One thing former Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra has besides one of the funnest last names ever to say out loud: a new job. He’s moving to from Silicon Valley to Austin and taking the CEO role at MapMyFitness, a four year old startup. MapMyFitness Founding CEO Robin Thurston will remain on the company’s board of directors and will lead the company’s product and development teams.
Jalichandra joined Technorati in late 2007 after a stint as a Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Battery Ventures. He previously held a variety of executive positions, including at Fox Interactive Media.
We first covered MapMyFitness in August 2010 when it closed a $5 million venture round from Austin Ventures. The company relocated from Colorado to Austin at that time as well. → Read More
Earlier today, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra gave his annual State of The Blogosphere presentation at the ad:tech conference. Technorati will be blogging about the findings over the next few days, which is based on a survey of 7,200 bloggers. But we have the full slide presentation after the jump.
Some key takeaways: → Read More
Technorati released the first installment of its 2009 State of the Blogosphere report today – the rest will follow over the course of this week. Last week CEO Richard Jalichandra showed highlights from the report at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.
We posted the full powerpoint presentation from that talk. And now we have the 47 minute video of his presentation as well.
The video is below, along with the original powerpoint presentation: → Read More
Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, fresh off a new funding and site relaunch, is showing some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report today at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.
We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below.
Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.
72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.
2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.
Lots more detail in the full presentation, below. You can see the audience reaction on Twitter here. → Read More
Technorati relaunched its site tonight, changing and adding key features. Most notable is an expanded and fresher top 100 blogs list, and a new feature that lets authors post their content directly to the site.
In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times. Here’s the first. And the second. The last change, made under the direction of incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra, has stayed more or less constant since then.
In the meantime, Technorati has focused on expanding it’s business in other areas, particularly in handling advertising for other sites. Today, only a small percentage of Technorati’s total network traffic of 25 million U.S. unique visitors per month actually visit Technorati.com.
But that doesn’t mean the flagship site isn’t an important asset. And those of us blogging for more than a couple of years can remember the days when Technorati was a key blogging tool, providing, among other things, a high quality real time search engine back when Google only indexed most blogs every few weeks.
Today Technorati still provides a great blog search engine and keeps what many call the definitive Top 100 list of blogs. With the new site, they are focusing more on direct Technorati content (more on that below), and properly categorizing the more popular blogs.
Go check it out yourself, and here’s a rundown of the new features: → Read More
Blog search engine (and more recently blog/social network advertising network) Technorati has raised a new round of financing – $2 million from existing investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital.
This is, the company says, an extension of their Series D round from June 2008, where they raised $7.5 million at a roughly $35 million valuation. The company has raise a total of just over $32 million to date (much of that at a much higher valuation).
The company is also in the process of raising additional capital via commercial debt, we’ve heard separately but haven’t confirmed.
This funding should get the company to profitability, says CEO Richard Jalichandra. He won’t say what revenues are, except that it has more than doubled each of the last two years. He also points out that Technorati’s network, with 25 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, is now the 5th largest social media property on the Internet.
In addition to its flagship site, Technorati supplies advertising to 450 or so websites – about half blogs, half niche social networks. → Read More
As we reported earlier today, media search engine Technorati has succumbed to the Twitter infatuation and is launching Twittorati, a site that shows what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about. Our earlier story indicates that the site is launching tomorrow but perhaps our post sped things up. We had a chance to demo the site with Technorati’s CEO Richard Jalichandra. The site pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, which is determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking (its equivalent to Google Page Rank). Authority Ranking is calculated via algorithm of inbound links from other blog posts, and weights those based on timing, relevancy and the inbound link’s site source Authority Ranking.
The blogs that are ranked vary by subject, with The Huffington Post taking the top spot, TechCrunch as no. 2 and Engadget in the no. 3. Twittorati pulls Tweets into a real-time stream (though not fully real-time; like Twitter, you still need to refresh the page to get real-time results) where you can organize Tweets by Authority Ranking or by latest Tweet. Because the Tweets are aggregated from blogs that cover a variety of subject relating to politics, technology, entertainment and more, the subjects of the Tweets are varied and somewhat random. But you can narrow your stream by filtering Tweets by Technorati Tags (life, news, music, politics, etc.) and the top trending Twitter hashtags. For example, some of the top Twitter hashtags that bloggers were Tweeting included #michaelphelps and #MJ. The origins of the Tweets include a blog’s Tweets and bloggers’ personal Tweets from their own accounts. Technorati says it has collected Twitter handles for most of the authors of the top 100 sites. → Read More
Twitter! Everyone wants a piece of it. Tomorrow, we’ve heard, blog search engine and ad network Technorati will unveil a new site called Twittorati: “where the blogosphere meets the Twittersphere.”
The site, which we haven’t seen yet, will show what top bloggers are tweeting about, and compare topics to blogosphere trends. The site will also, according to a press release we’ve seen, allow visitors to filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading blogosphere and Twitter trends. It sounds like it may be somewhat similar to Federated Media’s Exec Tweets.
Technorati Top 100 bloggers will be featured at launch, and it will expand to include more authors over time. The site was produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of Muckrack.com and VentureMaven. Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati.
More details when we actually see the site. → Read More
This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.
Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.
The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery. → Read More
Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web.
Swine Flu is the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, with users rapidly tweeting about the latest news about the disease, including whether it has spread to other states, the Center for Disease Control’s announcement, etc. → Read More
Blog search engine Technorati has laid off close to 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees in its PR, engineering and general admin areas. The company’s CEO, Richard Jalichandra confirmed the layoffs. He says they were necessary for the company to continue on the path towards profitability. The reduction will leave the company with 37 employees. Technorati suffered an earlier round of layoffs last September, letting go 6 people and also implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. We’ve added this to the layoff tracker.
Jalichandra maintains that the blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network, Technorati Media. Jalichandra says that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible. → Read More
Media search engine Technorati is about to release The Technorati Attention Index, which measures the mainstream media websites with the highest number of blogs linking to them in the past 30 days. Right now it has a blog post with the inaugural list. YouTube takes the top spot with the New York Times, BBC News, CNN.com, and MSN rounding out the top five. Compared to the top non-blog sources on Techmeme’s leaderboard, which is a narrower universe of sites which tech blogs link to, the top five mainstream media sites there are CNET News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Computerworld. (The leaderboard for sister site Memeorandum, which covers politics, more closely matches Technorati’s list).
Here’s the top five from Technorati’s index:
See the entire list after the jump. → Read More
Technorati has just launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics. Tag pages range from broad subjects like ‘internet’ to individual companies, with each page offering links to relevant articles, blog posts, user-written summaries, and related topics on Technorati (in some ways the pages are reminiscent of Mahalo’s topical overviews). Unfortunately, while these tags could eventually serve as a handy glossary to the web, it seems that in an effort to quickly build up content Technorati is openly inviting users to submit articles that are less than objective.
Technorati can automatically generate listings of recent blog posts relating to each tag, but it still has to rely on users to write the summaries for each page. To entice writers, the site is allowing users to include links to their own blogs or webpages in their submissions (provided they’re relevant). → Read More
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a new index yesterday that traces blogs and social networking sites. To be honest, it doesn’t say a whole lot that we don’t already know.
The New Media Index’s first report states “From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama’s inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.” The index reported that close to 63 percent of links embedded in social media sites related to the inauguration. Big surprise. The report also said that commentary was very passionate and ran the “ideological gamut.” Also, not earth-shattering news and confirms what everyone already knows-people tend to be more politically feisty on blogs and social media sites. → Read More
Twingly, the social blog search engine that prides itself in being completely spam-free, has launched BlogRank as a way to identify the 100 most important blogs in 12 different languages based on a proprietary ranking system. It’s very similar to what Technorati has been trying to achieve with their authority ranking, i.e. creating a Google PageRank for blogs.
The biggest difference is that Twingly breaks down the most popular blogs by language, which they claim is worth much more for local blogs than competing with others at an international level. I tend to agree with that. It’s rather similar to what Wikio is doing (disclosure: TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon is on Wikio’s board).
To demonstrate the technology, Twingly is debuting its Top 100 today, taking another page from Technorati in that regard. We may be a little biased, but we like Twingly’s Top 100 better because we came out on top across all languages tracked (we also lead the English-language blog ranking) → Read More
San Francisco based Technorati has acquired AdEngage, a twelve person advertising network based in Los Angeles, in an all stock transaction. The AdEngage platform will remain a free standing, branded service, and Technorati will also launch a version of the platform under its new Technorati Media brand. The size of the transaction is not being disclosed.
This follows Technorati’s August acquisition of BlogCritics, a network of blog content.
AdEngage, which was founded in 2004, sells advertising for 4,000 sites, and has 13 billion ad impressions per month, says Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra. Many of those sites are adult oriented, so Technorati isn’t merging it with its core service. Instead, they’ll launch a separate version of it under the Technorati Media brand in a few weeks. The screen shot below shows what the current, password protected version of the site looks like. → Read More
All week, Technorati is releasing data from its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. On Monday, Technorati told us that bloggers only need 100,000 visitors a month to make $75,000 a year (yeah, right). Today, it offers up something more believable: the more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.
Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment. → Read More
Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.
And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:
Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.
The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.
Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. → Read More
Technorati continues to redefine itself under CEO Richard Jalichandra, who joined the company in October 2007. In June they launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network.
Today they are announcing the acquisition of Blogcritics, a six year old blog network that we first wrote about in 2005. The price, which was all cash, is not being disclosed but our guess is that it is in the $1 million range. → Read More
Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well. As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing. The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors. Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy. Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options. Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs. Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content. Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently. For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months. CrunchBase Information Technorati Federated Media Glam Media Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
