Happy birthday Technorati
Three years ago, on November 27, 2002, Technorati was introduced to the world. Technorati started as a way for Dave Sifry to track who was talking about his blog online and the project eventually grew into a company of 30+ employees.
The blogosphere often gets caught up in the buzz of the moment, so here is a little history from Technorati in 2002:
The first Technorati 100. Scripting News was on top with links from 598 blogs and Boing Boing was #4 with links from 408 inbound blogs.
12,739 blogs watched in its first week.
$5 a year for a watchlist
Photo by Earthman, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Pictured above is the home of Technorati’s servers one year ago. I call it “the liquor store colo” because it has that back of the liquor store feel to it. I took a tour of Technorati’s new hosting facility, 365 Main, a few weeks ago. Technorati is now hosted in a converted tank manufacturing plant.
Building upon my summary of Technorati’s first two years, below are some personally selected highlights from Technorati’s third year.
December 19, 2004 — Technorati Japan, is announced as Technorati’s first international endeavor.
January 17, 2005 — Technorati tags introduced. Folksonomy applied to individual blog posts.
February 24, 2005 — First web spam summit bringing together key search engine publishers and indexers.
March 31, 2005 — One billion links tracked.
April 9, 2005 — Related tags launched.
May 16, 2005 — 10 million blogs tracked.
May 24, 2005 — One million distinct post tags.
June 20, 2005 — Major redesign launched.
July 27, 2005 — Language-specific search introduced.
July 28, 2005 — Technorati Mobile launched
August 2005 — Technorati search results integrated into Newsweek article pages.
September 1, 2005 — Blog Finder introduced. Tagging and folksonomy applied at the individual blog level.
October 24, 2005 — 20 million blogs tracked.
November 21, 2005 — Technorati Mini introduced, featuring updated results in a smaller window every minute.
[Disclaimer: I work for Technorati but this post was created from my own will and contains my personal opinion and perspectives.]