Technorati

78 posts filed under this category.

Technorati WTF annotates keyword search results

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 overtakes Technorati’s market share according to Hitwise

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…

Technorati redesigns for the MySpace crowd

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…

Technorati raises $10.52 million series C

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…

Technorati comScore stats for May

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 breakdown of Technorati traffic

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….

Technorati introduces microformats search

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…

Technorati Director Richard Ault leaves, joins Metroblogging

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…

Seeking new horizons

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 API

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…

New Technorati search results, profile features

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 Kitchen: it’s what’s cooking

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…

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…

Technorati clustered search

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…

Blogging and PR survey

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 with HP and Technorati

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…

Running a reliable blog tool and ping service

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…

Updated Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati

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 Blog Finder

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…

Hurricane Katrina on Technorati

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 party tonight in Palo Alto

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…

Kent Brockman on blog rumors

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 page on the London bombings

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 party on Wednesday

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…

GoDaddy misstates the facts

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…

Technorati is sponsoring a trip to BlogHer

Dave Sifry just announced Technorati’s contest to send a blogger to BlogHer, a conference focused on women bloggers taking place in Santa Clara on July 30. Technorati has thought about the best way to support the conference and the bloggers we serve. I thought about some of the different classes of bloggers out there and how each might benefit from attending the conference. I talked with the conference organizers to get a better idea of their vision and what they hope to accomplish. I am very lucky to live in the Bay Area at the center of technology world and…

Tag Tuesday tomorrow at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco

Technorati and Flickr are co-hosting a gathering of tag implementors and other interesting people tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m. at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco. We are calling the event Tag Tuesday and hope this will be the first of many meetings about tags as a freeform organizational tool. Kevin Marks of Technorati and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr will each have small presentations followed by a discussion. Technorati often receives questions from other organizations about the best way to implement tags within their blog, software, or project. I think the best way to learn is in-person and from people that…

Meet the new Technorati

It’s finally out! Meet the new Technorati (beta), a complete redesign and a few new features thrown in as well. Technorati blogs! Yes, it’s true. Technorati is a blog search company yet had no blog. Now we have two: one for the main site and one for developers. Snazzy new tag pages full of Ajax goodness. Related tags, photos, and links all load after the rest of the page. Subscribe to RSS feeds for tagged posts! This feature has actually been available for a few months but never exposed. We do not include the feed as a link alternate because…

Technorati Japan enters beta

Technorati Japan just entered beta. It’s exciting to see the first of what I hope will be many country-specific Technorati sites unveiled to the world. Have you ever wondered what are the top blogs in Japanese or the most talked about books in Japan? Now you can! The internationalization process is really interesting and exposes a lot of details about your data structure but mostly how you look at the world. Every society and country has their own ways of using weblogs and Japan is no different. Recent legislation in Japan requires all personally identifiable data travel over SSL. Anonymity…

Technorati partners with Salon.com

Technorati has partnered with Salon.com to integrate weblog content and commentary in Salon.com’s home page, the end of every article, and a roundup. Richard Ault took some good screenshots of the new features if you would like a small walk-through. I am really excited to see the writing of the masses combined with the edited writing of the few. Salon.com has been publishing original content online since 1995 and I have been reading the site intermittently since it started. Salon owns The WELL, the most famous online community. Salon chose to measure its hottest stories by the number of bloggers…

Underpants gnomes

Underpants Gnomes South Park clip from Season 2.

Nominations for the Open Media 100

AlwaysOn Network is working with Technorati to create a list of 100 top individuals who are leveraging the power of communities online to accomplish great things. The list is branded as the “Open Media 100” but has nothing to do with the Open Media Network. The list will not be ranked, but will include 100 individuals in the categories of pioneers, tool smiths, trendsetters, practitioners, and enablers. I am pretty sure members of the Open Media 100 need to publish a weblog and that requirement excludes people like Ward Cunningham or John Doerr. I think Dave Sifry and Joi Ito…

Technorati search goes to 11

Why does Technorati’s search page paginate through 11 result pages when other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves all use 10? Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap explains it best in this clip shown below. When you’re at 10 where can you go from there? If we need that extra push over the cliff we go to 11. Especially for the all-important presence amplifier.

Technorati nears one billion links tracked

One billllion… Technorati is currently less than nine million links away from reaching the one billion links tracked threshold.

Technorati User Salon this Thursday

We would like to bring together the community to reflect on the last few months in the world of weblogs and discuss how Technorati may be of service in the future…. Please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you are bringing so we can plan the event space, food, and drink.

David Sifry 106 Miles talk

I just finished editing the audio of David Sifry’s talk at the February meeting of 106 Miles, a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley.

Technorati mention on Charlie Rose

Glenn Reynolds: “If I had a big organization, like say if I ran The New York Times or some piece of it, I would pay somebody — and you wouldn’t have to pay them a lot, it’s not very hard — to just plug the URL for every New York Times story into Technorati which will then give you a list of every blog that links to that story and see what people say. And if you find a bunch of people saying there’s a mistake in it, I’d run a correction *snap* just like that and I’d credit somewhere on the website the blogs that pointed it out.

Technorati office photographs

Last Friday I took some photographs of the Technorati office space to share with our community. We are located in what used to be a printing press building. What a perfect location blogging company! We even have a printing press in our building lobby. Enjoy!…

Technorati Tags cleans up, adds RSS output

I have only been at Technorati for one day but we already have two new features I am proud to talk about. If you have an API key you can now receive a RSS feed containing the latest weblog posts with a given tag using TagQuery. Our tags page is now more compliant with web standards through the use of lists and emphasis elements. Tantek posted about the decisions behind his changes to the page’s markup. It has been interesting to see all the different uses of tags from companies interested in being included in Technorati’s tags pages. If you…

Technorati Tag API

Technorati opened up their tag API for anyone to query for posts associated with a tag. The query currently only returns Technorati’s own XML. Some other API changes now live: You can choose to not receive claimed weblog data for cosmos and search queries by setting the claim parameter to 0. Search query now has a limit parameter to allow for selective browsing. Cosmos query has a highlight parameter to highlight the anchor text within the excerpt….

Managing the Technorati community

Starting Tuesday, February 1, I will start a new job as Community Manager at Technorati. I will be responsible for helping the world understand Technorati’s service offerings and providing developers with the tools they need to build and extend Technorati. I will help make your voices heard and build new features to strengthen the links we create while consuming and producing content. I am excited to be working with a team of smart and passionate people. Technorati is not the only company competing to be your live search destination and keep you informed of the latest happenings in the areas…

Dear Technorati: Play well with others

This week’s announcements from Technorati have been mixed with endorsements and a message that Technorati may work better with one weblog platform than another. The Technorati tags help file contains an inline advertisement for TypePad. I could understand the use of Flickr and del.icio.us as the current most prominent uses of tags by the online community, but endorsing a weblog hosting company in your help file stinks of paid placement. Adding rel=”tag” to any link should be enough to build a tag library for links off the link text. Technorati instead grabs the last part of the URL after the…

Technorati launches Technorati Tags

Technorati launched Technorati Tags, a new, decentralized method of categorizing posts that also integrates with popular online communities del.icio.us and Flickr. Browse tags The front page displays a sampling of current popular tags sorted by UTF value. A tag’s popularity is expressed through font size: the more popular tags appear larger. Tag page Each tag has a page aggregating photos from Flickr, weblog posts indexed by Technorati, and del.icio.us links. Each page contains ten photographs, twenty posts, and fifteen links. http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + tag of your choice (no spaces) . Join the game of tag How can you be sure your…

Developer contest referral traffic

I have more referral traffic this week from the Technorati Developer’s Contest page than domestic Google and Yahoo! combined! Ranchero has about a third as many referrals as Technorati. Technorati released some new features this week but holding off on the announcement draws more attention to my work. Thanks!…

Technorati site search

Technorati now supports site search as a beta feature. Pass the “from” parameter in your URL string with your desired base URL and you can restrict your search to just those references. Technorati also has a searchlet for home page integration. As an example you can search my weblog for the keyword “technorati.”…

Technorati tags?

Just spotted on Adam Hertz’s blog links to Technorati tag URLs. The syntax is http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + keyword. Adam added a Technorati tag and a contest tag for a recent entry. A sign of things to come from Technorati? Could be a decentralized del.icio.us. Adam is Technorati’s VP of Engineering. A Technorati cosmos search for the base URL shows Adam is the only known source using the tag links. Kevin is playing along too, this time with a subdomain….

Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire

I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…

Attention.xml export for NetNewsWire

Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…

Technorati now supports keyword watchlists

Technorati now allows users to subscribe to a keyword search through a watchlist delivered in RSS format. You could of course do the same thing through the Technorati API through a SearchQuery and setting your format parameter to rss, but this method is a lot easier and finally fills a big hole for Technorati persistent search. Technorati also supports the use of boolean operators such as “AND” and “OR” and “NOT.” Note the operators must be in all capital letters for Technorati’s query analyzer to parse correctly….

Technorati developer chat

Technorati is hosting a developer chat on IRC this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. San Francisco time (03:00 UTC). If you are working on an entry for the developers contest ending this Friday the chat is a good opportunity to receive live answers to any problems you may have. Join #technorati on irc.freenode.net. I will be in the chat room and try to answer any questions or explain how the site and services work. Any really difficult questions will be left to the Technorati employees to figure out….

Technorati Users Group tonight

Tonight is the first ever meeting of the first Technorati Users Group at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will give an overview of Technorati and dive into its APIs. We will meet upstairs in the loft area. Everyone in attendance will receive a Technorati Users Group founding member t-shirt. You could also win one of two books. Good beer, good food, and a chance to learn about a service you can use for free. Come on down! I put together some slides to cover the basics of how Technorati works, how you can access their data,…

Technorati moving to a new colo

Technorati’s servers will be down this weekend as they move to a new colocation host. I mirrored the API documentation and SDK if you would like to continue developing without the live servers. Adam is posting pictures from the move on Flickr. [Update: As of 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday servers are back online.] Old compared to new:…

Technorati Users Group meeting December 21

Come drink beer and learn more about the Technorati API next Tuesday, December 21, at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will introduce Technorati API calls, demonstrate some existing applications built using the APIs, and lead you through some sample code using XPath and Java. A few Technorati employees will stop by and provide updates on the developer program and provide the latest company news. If you are interested in learning more about live search, web services, or corporate intelligence this event is for you! The Technorati developer contest ends December 31 so this will be a…

Technorati API first long look

I spent some time today looking at the Technorati API and coding part of a personal tracking application. The API server was spotty throughout the day, making testing difficult. I cleaned up some of the wiki documentation, stored my own copies of API responses, and used my own servers to pull the data. I put together a demo application using JavaScript. Some things I noticed: Cosmos query never returns rssurl or atomurl elements even though the data is stored. Use the weblog url as a parameter in a bloginfo query to pull this data. The lang element in bloginfo is…

David Sifry Red Herring interview

Red Herring published an interview with David Sifry of Technorati. The questions are pretty hard hitting and you get more background on Dave than the typical Technorati mention, like what he remembers about his high school prom. Secret to success? Work your ass off. Q. As much as Technorati is popular today, the company’s position in the industry can be considered tenuous. Do you have an exit strategy? A. Watch this space. Q. Are you profitable? A. Not yet….

Technorati two years later

Two years ago Dave Sifry announced Technorati: a new site with a set of web services he always wanted and spent three weekends hacking. Take a look at the Technorati of two years ago. Unofficial history of Technorati November 20, 2002Official first use date. November 27, 2002Technorati officially unveiled. 12,000 weblogs indexed. December 4, 2002RSS watchlists. December 15, 2002First Technorati dinner. December 18, 2002Technorati sidebar. February 7, 2003Site contents released under Creative Commons license. February 26, 2003First major downtime: 4 hours. March 5, 2003100,000 weblogs indexed. March 9, 2003Revenues of $2,000 over three months from charging a yearly subscription…

Apologies to Technorati

This morning when I checked my e-mail I found a note from Liz Westover sent to the Technorati Developers’ e-mail list. Liz mentioned some changes to the site David Sifry would announce later in the day but the developers received early notice. One of the features mentioned was very similar to feature I knew existed behind-the-scenes on the Technorati site. Something anyone could enable but was unpublicized and not publicly known. Tantek Çelik and Richard Ault let me preview a new site feature and I was supposed to keep my mouth shut since the feature was not yet public. Well…

Technorati site search

Blogware has a site-search feature using Technorati integrated into Blogware 1.21 and Technorati Cosmos links on every post. Blogware users can enable the Cosmos links in the advanced section of posting defaults….

Betting on Tools that Power Blogs

Olga Kharif of BusinessWeek wrote about the companies building weblog tools and the venture capital that follows. Ask David Sifry when his little San Francisco startup called Technorati will turn a profit, and he laughs contagiously. No, Technorati, which tracks Web logs, or blogs, and will soon offer blog searches, is a long way from turning a profit. But it has big-league venture-capital backers like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, and they’re willing to wait as blog entrepreneurs cast around for a good business model….

Technorati changes

Technorati is no longer just phrase search! Technorati launched new features and a new redesign today. A new feature still in testing is a feed with enclosures of the top 20 MP3 references in the blogosphere. Dave also claims they have better blogroll detection. They fixed the Developer’s Wiki and I can finally login again. Technorati also announced a $3250 developer’s contest ending December 31. A lot to announce all at once! I noticed there are no advertisements on the search results page. Could be unintentional but an interesting change….

Technorati trademarks

On August 26, 2004 Technorati filed a trademark application for “attention index” (serial number 78474374). This move shows Technorati is serious enough about Attention.xml to file a trademark application with the Patent Office. Technorati also has a Goodpoint trademark about to clear. I have no idea what the significance of that trademark is about but it was filed while Krisztina Mendonca (GoodPoint Web Design) was doing contract design work for Technorati….

Technorati open house

Tonight was the Technorati open house at their new offices near SBC Park. The event was catered and drew a large crowd. You can check out pictures from the event. There were many new Technorati employees I had not seen before, including Jason DeFillipo, who is currently working as a contractor for Technorati’s new search functions. That’s right, Technorati is not just phrase search any more. They have new boolean features and will show search results from not just the last week. The new features should be announced any day now. It will be interesting to see how their servers…

Technorati Party October 28

Technorati is throwing a party next Thursday, October 28, at their new office space near SBC Park in San Francisco. The new office is within walking distance of the N Judah and CalTrain train stops. Free beer, WiFi, food, and interesting people….

Technorati presents AOL Journals

Technorati has a subdomain focused on the world of AOL Journals. Focused news talk, recent entries, and top 100 journals. Notice that the total weblogs watched and links tracked are a bit off. This subdomain is probably a mockup….

Technorati Hackathon reflections

Last night Technorati held a Hackathon at their new offices near SBC Park. There were about 30 people in attendance including the Technorati crew. Some remote users joined via IRC. Good pizza, the beer did not run out, and the salad was almost untouched. Thanks to Liz Westover for putting together the event. Dave and Tantek spoke about Technorati and its APIs. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and our interests related to Technorati and the hackathon. Ideas were thrown on the whiteboard but by the end of the introductions no one was interested in splitting up into…

Technorati Hackathon

Technorati is hosting a hackathon next Wednesday starting at 7 p.m. in their new offices in San Francisco. Parking should be ample. If you take the N Judah to SBC Park (3rd and King) Technorati’s office is a one block walk. Tantek extends an invitation to web designers and web developers. it’s not just a night of API developers. I created a wiki page on the developers site to track topics. I would like to work on a RSS aggregator plugin that sorts feeds by source authority. Anyone else interested in such a project and would like to collaborate?…

Technorati receives new funding

Om Malik reports that Technorati either has or is about to close its first round of funding. $6.5 million at a company valuation of around $12 million. (via Anil Dash)…

Technorati tracks 3 million weblogs

Technorati broke past the 3 million weblog mark last night. “On an average weekday, we’re seeing over 15,000 new weblogs created per day. That means that a new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds.” Technorati pulls new weblogs from sources like weblogs.com and blo.gs. You could of course ping Technorati directly, but I would like to see a more stable what’s new service with the traffic and hosting burdens shouldered by the industry….

Tantek is now at Technorati

Tantek çelik is now working for Technorati. The move means good things for the Web, as Tantek can utilize indexing semantic web data from the Technorati database. He also has a much shorter commute, allowing more time for side projects. Tantek was formerly Microsoft’s Web standards ambassador and responsible for much of the work on CSS….

Technorati Developer’s Salon

I attended the Technorati Developers Salon tonight in San Francisco. I arrived at a non-descript side entrance and rang an unlabeled call box. Kevin Marks answered the door, and I knew I was in the right place. After an hour of mingling, pizza, salad, and Anchor Steam, the group of about 40 people headed downstairs. Sputnik wireless access covered the entire two story office space. The office space is very large, considering Technorati employs only 8 people. They should be able to expand to 50 people at least in this office space. Dave Sifry started things off. Technorati picks up,…

New Technorati APIs and SDK

Technorati released a new version of its APIs tonight. Details are available on the Technorati developers wiki. Use apibeta.technorati.com for now but, if there are no major issues, beta will end in about a week. Technorati will now return your query as RSS if you specify your format parameter. Data are returned in UTF-8 format. The new API has better error handling, including appropriate HTTP responses for bad data or no data. Outbound links are sorted by dates and duplicate links stripped. The new API also allows you to limit the number of returned items….

Technorati helps you pick the winner

Why has the world of online marketing not picked up on the image campaigns of radio stations and trade shows? There are individuals willing to wear your t-shirt, place a bumper sticker on their car, or answer their phone proclaiming their love for your product if there is a chance of a product giveaway reward for compliance. The street team, the random person in the trade show crowd that just might sight you and reward you with an iPod or free concert tickets. In the world of weblogs, a marketing company would team up with Technorati for a marketing campaign….

Technorati Developers Salon

Dave Sifry announced a Technorati developers meeting on Wednesday, May 19 from 6-9 p.m….

Technorati redesign

Technorati is sporting a new look this morning. Dave Sifry mentions the new features of Technorati in his weblog. Three free email or RSS watchlists for members. The developer tab is nice. “Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.” Good. I want to build some nice things using the API, if only the backend was more reliable. It would nice to mention working hard to improve developer experience as well, since it will ultimately lead to new users….

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