This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (WordPress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube… → Read More
Technorati has a brand new CEO, and he’s been busy in his short time with the company. Today Technorati is relaunching, with a new core focus on bloggers. Last week I saw a demo of the new products, which CEO Richard Jalichandra and VP Engineering Dorion Carroll say reflect the company’s re-dedication to their core audience: bloggers and advertisers. Technorati Front Page The recently… → Read More
When Technorati announced a new CEO at the beginning of October, many were hoping that the once great Technorati would focus on its core blog search product, a product that had been virtually ignored as the company tried to be all things to everybody, whilst never being the master of one thing. It might have been wishful thinking. Zoli Erdos noticed on Monday that he couldn’t find anything… → Read More
I was hoping that the changing of the guard at Technorati would mean that the company would learn to become somewhat humble. Early signs say that isn’t the case. In a Wired interview, incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra did note that the company has some challenges ahead (in reality, the only challenge is to find a buyer, fast). But he also describes Techmeme, which has a single employee, never… → Read More
Technorati today announced its search for a new CEO was over, with Richard Jalichandra being appointed to the role, some 6 weeks since Technorati’s founding CEO David Sifry stepped down and 5 months since it was publicly confirmed that Technorati was seeking a new CEO. Prior to joining Technorati, Jalichandra held roles at Exponential Interactive, Fox Interactive Media and IGN Entertainment. → Read More
Update: The leaderboard has launched. See it here. Blog search engine Technorati’s founding CEO is gone, its traffic party has ended and its core search functionality is under long term fire from competitors like Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere (among others). Constant strategic shifts haven’t helped much either. But Technorati still has one stronghold left – it controls… → Read More
Technorati has announced the launch of Technorati Topics, a live river of news stream that delivers a moving list of blog posts. It replaces the just relaunched Technorati home page. Technorati’s Dorion Carroll said that the changes were due to user feedback on “how [Technorati] should organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers… → Read More
We’ve all known that blog search engine Technorati and videocasting site PodTech weren’t doing particularly well: that both companies were conducting CEO searches. But today the bloodletting became real. PodTech CEO John Furrier is out. James McCormick, the COO, steps up to the CEO position. The company also announced that 1938 Media is no longer partnering with them, which is a real… → Read More
Recent Comscore stats show Technorati continuing to surge in traffic, more than tripling since a year ago. Founder and CEO Dave Sifry recently mentioned about this staggering growth in a blog post. Technorati’s internal numbers showed massive growth early this year. They had nine million unique visitors in March, up from 3.5 million two months prior. And page views, he said, were up 141%… → Read More
All that new traffic from the relaunch, and the site goes down for the count. Or maybe it really is “scheduled maintenance,” in the middle of the day, at peak traffic times. I love Technorati, even when they lie to me. → Read More
Blog search engine Technorati made significant changes to its data architecture and user interface this evening. CEO Dave Sifry outlined the details on his personal blog. The changes, Sifry says, are largely in response to Technorati’s changing user base – more and more mainstream Internet users are using the service. This is also a clear move by Technorati away from blog search… → Read More
Technorati has retained New York-based James and Company to conduct a CEO search for the company. For the last few weeks, the firm has been reaching out to potential candidates in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to gauge their interest in leading the nearly four year old company. No word on whether founder and current CEO Dave Sifry will take a new position at the company or will move on to something… → Read More
Update: Dave Sifry responds in the comments, saying “I’ll be very clear about it – Technorati isn’t for sale.” Which means, of course, that Technorati is for sale. Blog search engine Technorati has always been more secretive about itself than most other startups. They won’t comment on venture financings, for example, even to correct incorrect information. So it means… → Read More
A key Technorati developer, Kevin Marks, has left the company and is now at Google, according to his blog. Just a month and a half ago Google took the lead as the top blog search engine from Technorait, and the loss of Marks to them is a further blow. Technorati releases very little information to the public about itself, leaving us to mostly speculate on their financial health. This move could be… → Read More
Today’s the day – SuperBowl XLI. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will eat junk food, drink beer, and watch the best television advertising all year interrupted periodically with a football game. Six startups (Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati) who can’t afford the $2.5 million plus for a thirty second spot during the game got together to produce… → Read More
Steve Rubel somehow came across a new Digg-like Technorati product called “WTF,” which stands for “Where’s the Fire?” It was briefly live at technorati.com/wtf, but is no longer available. From the screen shots (see below, care of Rubel), it appears to have very similar features as Digg, where users can vote for stories they find interesting and force them higher in… → Read More
Metrics company Hitwise writes a sensational blog post showing the dramatic rise of Google Blog Search against competitors Technorati and Sphere. Their data is saying that this week, for the first time, Google Blogsearch surpassed Technorati in total visits. Google Blog Search just passed 0.0025% of total internet traffic, according to Hitwise, v. 0.0023% for Technorati. The reason for the surge… → Read More
Blog search engine Technorati announced tonight that bloggers will now be able to claim ownership of their blogs with Open ID credentials and that more work in support of Open ID is on the way. Open ID provides one URL you can use to identify yourself at all participating sites around the web. You can handle the logistics yourself or you can pay any number of different vendors to register your ID… → Read More
We reported last month that blog search engine Technorati had raised $7.6 million in Series C funding in June from previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. Today’s PE Wire now says that Series C funding has hit $10.52 million. The previous investment left many mystified about the implications, today’s news really begs the question of where Technorati is… → Read More
Technorati has updated their design and added new features, as they celebrate their third birthday. See a post by CEO Dave Sifry on the Technorati blog for more. Thumbs up across the board on this one. The design is much better and easier to read than its year-old predecessor. The new features, though, are where the action is. In particular, the new “Discover” area of the site is an… → Read More
Blog search engine Technorati raised an additional $7.6 million in Series C funding in June from previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. The information has been picked up from a SEC document files by one of the investor’s limited partners. Notably, August Capital, a previous investor, did not participate in this round. This news comes just after news of rival… → Read More
Assigning some sort of quality to real time search is necessary. Tracking incoming links to a particular post doesn’t work because, well, since this stuff is real time there is no time to track links. Memeorandum does track blog post links in near real time, but with a very small index of blogs. Tracking this across the entire blogosphere is much more difficult. Robert Scoble points out that… → Read More
I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo. The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users. → Read More
Yahoo’s recent acquisition binge is the topic of a Red Herring print article this week called “Hungry Hungry Yahoo”. Liz Gannes, who wrote the article, discusses Yahoo’s recent acquisitions and speculates on a few likely candidates for future Yahoo shopping sprees. The article lists 37 Signals, MeasureMap, Digg, YouTube and Technorati as the ones to watch. (Note: Liz… → Read More
There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do… → Read More
Whoa. Niall Kennedy nonchalantly wrote earlier today about Technorati’s version of Google Labs, called Technorati Kitchen. It’s where Technorati is putting it’s not-fully-baked beta products. There’s only one project there now, and it’s called “Explore“. Explore sure looks a like it was inspired by Memeorandum: Explore Find out what bloggers are saying… → Read More
Steve Rubel’s “Ten Technorati Hacks” is outstanding. If you are looking to exploit the deeper features of Technorati, read his post. My favorite features: Suscribe to Tag Feeds: Every technorati tag has its own feed Subscribe to Search Feeds: Every search has its own feed. Individual Blog Search: Click on the search tab and then enter the unique blog URL you want to search. → Read More
Niall Kennedy at Technorati has just informed me that they have quietly updated their tag search engine with full boolean search functionality. In August, Technorati added the OR function to tag search. On a search for “apple OR microsoft”, the results would include any posts that included either tag. While useful, this functionality essentially just reduced the number of searches a… → Read More
Dave Sifry announced the Technorati Blog Finder this evening. Derek Powazek at Technorati also posts on Blog Finder here. What is it? It’s a ranked list of blogs. By Tag. David Powazek calls it “a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine”. Here’s Katrina. Here’s Web 2.0. Here’s Skype. How good is it? I think it has some problems. Tags are publisher created and… → Read More
Niall Kennedy just announced that Technorati now allows multiple tag search. With this new functionality, you can do a single search and find posts that have any of the two or more tags you type in. Niall says: You can now search Technorati for multiple tags! Just separate each tag with the word “OR” to add an posts tagged with your specified tag to your search results. Multiple tags… → Read More
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