Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Technorati Turns Three - I’ll Take Alliteration for $300, Alex

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on July 24, 2006
in Startups and Technology
. 0 Comments

Technorati enters the terrible threes, undergoes a major upgrade - and I (mostly) like what I see.

As a new blogger, one of the things I just did as part of getting things started was to sign up for Technorati, include it in my ping services, and include rel=tag tags in each of my (new) posts. Next, to upload a headshot to the site.

Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati announces the upgrade here. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch comments here.

It appears that I am currently ranked 750,889 on the Technorati rankings:

That’s interesting, since I pretty much have no content today, and they claim to be tracking 50 million blogs. This implies to me that there are 49.25 million other blogs that are in a sadder state than mine. That would be a sorry state of affairs for the blogosphere, and if it’s true, how many blogs actually matter? I’ll continue to track this and let you know as I move up or down the ranks.

Back to Technorati… Dave and the team at Technorati were definitely ahead of the curve three years ago. That’s usually not a good thing for a startup - you’d much rather be riding the wave. They started out servicing the burgeoning blog community and have watched that community grow to 50 million blogs. Impressive growth, but hardly a big market (yet). I love the "freshness" of searches on their site. They need to continue to innovate and improve the speed of their searches. The upgrades look to be a good step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, I just got one of these:

That’s a good news/bad news story. Good news is that they are getting a ton of traffic. Bad news is that they can’t handle it all. That’s pretty unacceptable for a search firm, especially after announcing improvements in their infrastructure. Google has shown this to be an infinitely scalable problem.

What I like about it:

  • First to market; leader in this space
  • Tag mining using rel=tag innovative and simple
  • The did a great job with the UI in the latest relaunch - well done!
  • Particularly happy with the new "Discover" section
  • "Freshness" of the search, ordered by date of post
  • Currently ranked 248 in the Alexa Traffic Rankings
  • 50M blogs and greatly improved Alexa rankings in last 6 months
  • They appear to have the brand recognition for blog search

What I don’t like about it:

  • No real lock on the blogosphere; they get pings just like anyone can get pings
  • Improved Alexa rankings may suggest more indexing and less user traffic
    • Would Technorati comment on the traffic distribution for robots vs humans?
  • Failure to complete my search!
  • It was a lot easier to tell my Mom to go to blogsearch.google.com than to try to spell out t-e-c-h-n-o-r-a-t-i-.-c-o-m for her.

Technorati has done a nice job in the last 3 years. Congratulations, team!

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Transparency

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on July 24, 2006
in Personal
. 3 Comments

Blog Transparency can be scary.

So, I’ve decided to add a bit of transparency to my life. I spend a good chunk of my week networking with people in my line of business and people interested in like-minded pursuits of happiness. Perhaps this web-based venue will allow me to me expand the reach of that network by allowing you, the reader, to get to know me just a wee bit better. I’ll let you decide if my transparency is enough to convince you to contact me. Ball’s in your court.

I know I’m a bit nervous about this endeavor. Especially out here where everyone in the world can participate in the conversation. By "transparency", I mean "sharing your thoughts, opinions, and selected events of your life openly and freely". Some of the things that cause me to be a bit worried about my personal Blog Transparency include:

  • The Internet is an amazing archiving machine (see also: the Wayback machine). Before you start blogging, should you have to listen to some kind of Blogger’s Miranda Rights? "Anything you write can, and will, be held against you in whatever public forum we deem fit".
  • Where do you draw the Transparency line? How transparent is too transparent? How personal is too personal? There are a lot of phishing predators out there. By including personal details (like my age and the events of my birthday party, say), it would seem that I will be exposing myself more than others.
  • What happens when I say something stupid or, rather, forget to say something smart? What happens when I unknowingly offend someone? What happens when I make a spelling or grammar error (there are likely 4 or 5 in this first post)?
  • When should you write about rumor and conjecture you hear on the streets? When should you not write about something?
  • I’m not a writer and I don’t play one on TV. I’m much better in person. Really. The "me" that you see here is but a small, and in many ways skewed, sampling of the "me" that I actually am.
  • I don’t know if I truly have the time to devote to this activity and to keep the quality of the posts high enough for your enjoyment (I am a slow writer). Let’s get started and see where it takes us…

In the final analysis, I don’t think any of that stuff matters - I can figure it out along the way. In fact, it is because of that stuff that Blog Transparency is important. Being truly transparent means that you don’t have to "spin" or pretend to be someone that you aren’t. It means that people see all sides of you - the good, bad, stupid, and the ugly. If someone decides to contact me after reading about some of my not so pretty sides, it means that they actually want to converse with me and not just the external face that most of us project to the world. This makes the contact more valuable to all parties. Transparency improves my network in both quantity and quality.

Ultimately, transparency is truth. Truth matters.

Many have blogged about the value and importance of Blog Transparency. Some examples:

My blog is about things that matter to me. Some of those things include:

  • My family, friends, and loved ones
  • Venture Capital & Private Equity
  • Technology Trends
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Open Source Software
  • Cooking
  • Books
  • Mountaineering & Hiking
  • Motorcycles
  • Golfing
  • Photography
  • SCUBA Diving
  • And, of course, Electronic Gadgets

I hope you will find an occasional nugget of interest to you.

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