Technorati launched a new search annotation feature today, letting site members briefly explain the rising popularity of a keyword or phrase. The original idea for Technorati WTF came from a few Technorati super fans and an internal hack day over a year ago. Backstory Technorati's top searches have always been a good way to track popular news themes of the moment. Top searches against a blog search engine often correlate with the news and information the blogosphere is hunting for at any given time. If a web hosting company was offline for an extended period of time, you'd start seeing…
Google Blog Search has overtaken Technorati's market share in the United States according to LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise. The success of the Google Blog Search is hand-in-hand with Google leveraging existing properties such as Google News and the Google homepage to drive traffic to its new property. Google Blog Search launched in September 2005. Technorati is the green line above, and Google Blog Search is shown in purple. Google Blog Search received a huge traffic boost in October after blog search appeared as an option on Google News pages. Google Blog Search later received a spot on the front page…
Summer is here, meaning it must be time for a new site design from Technorati. The four major Technorati redesigns have each tried to welcome a different type of crowd to the site without alienating existing users. When the site went online in November 2002 the target audience was alpha-bloggers and Linux Journal readers. The company was incorporated in May 2003 and saw its first big redesign in the summer of 2004 focused on the new users visiting the site for real-time information in the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In 2005 the site redesigned again, aiming for…
Update 8/15: PE Wire places the total amount raised at $10.52 million, not $7.6 million as previously reported. Technorati received a $10.52 million investment in June from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. The investment was revealed in a SEC filing on June 22 and made public on Monday. VentureWire reported the investment in its popular newsletter this week. Andreas Stavropoulous of DFJ and Ryan McIntyre of Mobius were previous investors in Technorati and have occupied board seats for close to two years. Technorati took an angel round of investment in the summer of 2003 from a few individuals…
According to comScore Media Metrix numbers cited by the San Francisco Chronicle Google Blog Search had 94,000 unique visitors in May versus 3.3 million unique visitors for Technorati in the same period. Google Blog Search has less than 3% of the number of users as Technorati under those metrics. Either that's a typo or Google is not very competitive in both blog search or shopping comparison verticals….
comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati's visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006. Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites. Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati's media partners in the comScore analysis….
You can now search for contacts, events, and reviews on Technorati using microformats search. The new feature exposes content from the Technorati index containing special HTML markup within a page or post. Sites such as Upcoming.org and Yahoo! UK Movie Reviews currently markup their content using microformats out of general interest in distributed structured markup but new search engines such as Technorati's beta search product might send enough traffic to publishers to cause a shift in publishing behavior and templates. Many individual publishers will not notice the change as blog platform providers such as Six Apart's Vox will collect data…
Richard Ault just announced he has left Technorati to join Metroblogging, a network of blog sites focused on local content from over 45 cities throughout the world. Richard was Director of Product Marketing at Technorati since January 2004, and one of the first company hires. Metroblogging was co-founded by Jason DeFillippo, who left Technorati in February to focus on the blog network full-time. Richard enjoys skiing and it wouldn't surprise me if he and his family is working from Lake Tahoe until the snow melts and their house is remodeled. Tags: metroblogging…
I am leaving Technorati to pursue new opportunities. I submitted my resignation letter this morning and I will be a free agent on March 1. I joined Technorati in February 2005 excited about changing the world of weblogs and introducing people to a new kind of search. Almost a year later my passions at work have eroded and it's time to find new horizons. Valentines Day is the perfect time to rekindle lost flames. The company has accomplished a lot in the past year, emerging from what many people viewed as a commodity space into a market leader. The Alexa…
Google Toolbar version 4 allows developers to create custom buttons using a custom XML descriptor and extended functionality using RDF, RSS, and Atom feeds. The Google toolbar button API can be used to display the latest entry titles from a feed, execute a keyword or URL search, or continuously communicate data at a glance. I created custom buttons for this blog and Technorati. The Google Toolbar can now serve as a feed reader for any feed with a custom Google Toolbar icon. You can even specify in your button file a different icon you would like to display when new…
Technorati released a redesigned search results page and member profiles tonight, including some features I've been wanting for a long time. You can find the official announcement on the Technorati weblog and I will share my personal thoughts and favorites below. Personal tag cloud Technorati now displays a personal tag cloud for each member profile! You can now glance at a blogger's profile and get a pretty good idea about his or her most blogged about topics. Tim Appnel's Tags.App plugin for Movable Type displays some similar tag visualizations but now anyone on any blog platform can visualize their topical…
Technorati just introduced the Technorati Kitchen, an area where we can post projects we have been working on that we do not feel are ready for integration on the main site. The first project available in the Technorati Kitchen is Explore, a way to discover the most popular recent blog posts around a specific topic of interest. You can use Explore to see emerging trends in the areas you care about or just catch up with the top stories of the day in a few minutes. The beta moniker is so overused and abused no one can really take it…
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…
Technorati has combined keyword search and Blog Finder to enable clustered search across various blog-level topic areas. Searching for the information you care about can be a bit elusive. A gardener looking for the last information about a bush will be overwhelmed with information about George W. Restrict your search to gardening and you have some interesting results. You have a similar problem with the search term "Java." Would you like information about coffee, the Indonesian island, or the programming language? You can combine advanced keyword search with advanced tag search for some even more interesting results. You can search…
Technorati and Edelman are partnering to help public relations and corporate communications in general better understand the preferences of bloggers. I've had a lot of bad experiences with PR pitches and there is definitely room for improvement. If you would like to help companies better tailor their methods and their approach to blogging you can share your opinions and answer a short survey. A bad PR agency e-mails me a press release asking if I would please post the press release on my blog. Good PR is when I am introduced to new things that solve a personal problem or…
Tag Tuesday is back! If you are in the San Francisco area come out to Varnish Fine Art this Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Scott Golder from HP Labs will talk about his recent research paper on collaborative tagging and Kevin Marks of Technorati will talk about the design and implementation of Blog Finder. Tag Tuesday is a developer-centered event. If you are working with tags or related methods of user classification and would like to present, let me know. Tags: hp, blogfinder, tags, tagtuesday…
Most people do not realize how ping notification services ("ping beacons") can negatively affect user experience for a blog tool vendor. Blog authors usually welcome the publicity but are not sure who to blame when something goes wrong, if the user even knows what went wrong and where. Let's start with some background on the process of a ping notification ("ping"). The blog author hits the "Post" button, publishing his or her blog entry to a publicly available website. The blog tool retrieves a listing of specified services that are either platform-defined defaults or user-specified preferences. The blog tool attempts…
Yesterday afternoon I updated the Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati with new first-person reports and information resources about the hurricane and its aftermath. The original featured content from Monday focused on the latest news about the hurricane and it's immediate impact. There were links to weather sites such as NOAA and first-hand accounts from people who had been in the middle of the winds and rains that tore through southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Many people updated their blogs with the latest news, accounts, and general observations from their immediate geographic area. Commenters provided advice from tornado and hurricane affected…
Technorati just introduced Technorati Blog Finder, a browsable and searchable directory of blogs powered by tags. The Technorati Blog Finder helps you find blogs of interest in the subject areas you care about. The Technorati Blog Finder is a product created with a lot of user feedback about what groups they identify with online and how they would like to find other bloggers within that interest. Technorati seeded the list using a blogger's most common post tags but authors can edit, change, or delete these tags — up to 20 total — through their Technorati member account page. You can…
I spent my morning summarizing the current happenings around Hurricane Katrina for a new Technorati page on the topic. Some interesting observations with limited citations as I am just braindumping. Bloggers opened their houses to each other sight unseen. Blogs with video and photo coverage quickly exceeded their bandwidth limits and were offline this morning. CNN setup a special citizen journalists page for submissions. Technorati received calls from media outlets this morning in their search of the latest news from the blogosphere. Bloggers lost power and Internet access put kept on blogging through laptops connected to dial-up modems and free…
Technorati is sponsoring dinner and drinks — free as in beer — tonight, August 20, at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto from 7 p.m. until 9 p.m. The event coincides with the nearby BarCamp event nearby. If you are in the Palo Alto area I hope you can join us tomorrow night for some garlic fries, beer, and many interesting people in downtown Palo Alto. Tags: barcamp, paloalto…
B.L. Ochman was given a tip from a venture capitalist that Technorati is about to be sold "to a large search company." I immediately thought of The Simpsons' Kent Brockman from the Deep Space Homer episode in season 5. You can watch the 4.7 MB video clip of the ant overlords and have a good Friday. As for the rumor? No comment but I hope any company interested in search and using Technorati's services will check out the Technorati developer APIs to get a better idea of how they might be able to work with Technorati and its underlying data….
Technorati has created a special page dedicated to aggregating weblog posts related to the four bomb explosions in London this morning and the corresponding activity in London and around the world. The sidebar contains links to popular sources of news and information chosen by the Technorati staff. There is a lot of information still being discovered and it has been interesting to watch the story unfold from millions of keyboards around the world. I was especially surprised to see the number of photographs people posted of their televisions tuned to news channel reporting. Tags: 070705, london…
Technorati is having a party! We're preparing for a busy week and a few product launches and we want to bring the community together to learn face-to-face what's new and exciting and to gather your feedback. We will also have a few announcements so if you are a blogger in search of a scoop this will be an extra fun party. The party will be held at the House of Sheids on Wednesday, June 22, from 6:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. or until whenever everyone decides to leave. Technorati will provide some food and a no-host bar. Please send an…
Some companies love to issue press releases for every little thing. Go Daddy is one of those companies. Hot on the heels of their press release about their blog's six-month anniversary comes a press release claiming Bob Parsons has the 23rd most popular blog and the most popular CEO blog. Too bad they provide no fact to support either claim. Technorati ranks blogs according to the most "click-throughs" on commonly-searched keywords. http://www.bobparsons.com covers a variety of topics, many of which do not contain such keywords; for that reason, Parsons' blog is not listed in the Top 100. Not true. The…
