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 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 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….
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'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:…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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….
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 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….
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….
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 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….
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 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?…
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 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 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….
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,…
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….
