Skip to main content

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

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!

Tags: , , , , ,
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kernel-based Virtual Machine hits Linux

Many congratulations to my good friend Moshe Bar and his team over at (stealth-mode startup) Qumranet . Techworld reports that the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project has been accepted into the 2.6.20 version of the Linux kernel distribution. KVM is an Open Source kernel driver that basically allows a Linux kernel to host virtual machines, as plain old Linux processes, that can run Linux or Windows (or other x86-based operating systems). It runs only on hardware that support Intel's VT instruction set (which is fine) and will soon support the AMD-V instruction set as well. This is cool for a number of reasons. It's Open Source, released under the GPL. It basically turns the Linux that we all know and love into a "hypervisor". Linux-as-hypervisor makes sense because Linux already knows how to manage devices, memory, processes, multi-cores, etc. VMware ESX is, essentially, a "hypervisor" - a small kernel, built on Linux as it turns out, that
2 comments
Read more

Bill Coleman Joins 3tera Advisory Board

I think this move surprised a number of people, since Bill recently wrapped up Cassatt Corproation, getting the technology and people  acquired by Computer Associates . However, I was not surprised at all. The announcement, via  3tera Welcomes Bill Coleman : You may or may not have seen the recent press realease.  Bill Coleman, IT/Silicon Valley luminary, Founder and CEO of BEA Systems, has joined 3Tera’s Advisory Board. Yes, this alone is a great testimonial to what we have accomplished in our field.  Getting dignitaries such as Bill does not come easy.  But here’s the best part - this has a lot more than just marquee value and I doubt that Bill would have joined us if that was the case.  Bill, especially since his most recent stint as Founder and CEO of Cassatt Systems, is an extremely knowledgeable visionary in the area of utility and Cloud Computing; and, data center automation. So, Bill will be extremely valuable, reviewing and tweaking both our business plans and techno
Post a Comment
Read more

Big In Japan Open Sources Their Ruby On Rails Tools

The kind folks over at Big In Japan have graciously decided to Open Source the code they used to build their demo web sites . It's all Ruby on Rails code, and it's being released with a GPL license. The code trees being made available include: elfURL ~ URL Shortner FeedVault ~ OPML file storage FrankenFeed ~ RSS feed merger InstantFeed ~ RSS feeds via email QwikPing ~ Ping Server SocialMail ~ RSS via email Very cool. I just love the Open Source community . I have actually been writing some code of late, and it's great to have some reference code to check out. Not sure if I'm going to go with Ruby on Rails yet, however. And, for the record. I have no idea if this is big in Japan. Tags: Open Source , GPL , Ruby On Rails , Big In Japan , Brian Berliner , brianberliner
Post a Comment
Read more