Last fall, I spoke at the Internet Summit on a panel with Richard Jalichindra, the CEO at Technorati. They had recently relaunched Technorati, and his continuation of founder David Sifry's "state of the blogosphere" was a good take on what was new on blogs. His data mirrored what we see at Blogger: there are more blogs than ever, we're growing faster than ever, and there are more people reading blogs than ever before. It's a vibrant medium, and it's an exciting time to be in the space.
I told Richard then that I had been a long time fan of Technorati - as an early blogger, it was the first tool to emerge that seemed to understand the value of real-time search. But over time Technorati shifted focus (a few times), was challenged by spam blogs infesting its index, and with their relaunch they shifted to topically organizing "top" blogs. I'd fallen out of the habit of checking Technorati.
Last night, I spoke at Blog Out Loud, a terrific event that ended up being a lot of fun. (More on that later.) On the panel with me was Technorati VP Dave White, who talked a bit more about what Technorati aims to do for bloggers. After hearing that they aim to help users find topically focused, authoritative blogs, I figured it was a good idea to give the site another look and poke around.
So... this is my post to "claim" the blog, which establishes that yes, I am the guy who updates this blog. Will see what that does for me, and will circle back once I've knocked around a bit.
Claim: VEA8VSN5FWHP. Whee.
Technorati become relevant again? Interesting. But how do they track this stuff, we have to install another damn widget? I won't do it!
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you being nice to those guys. I met with them in January to see what the deal was - especially since so many people have written them off. They're not out of the woods yet by any means, but we should definitely keep watching.
ReplyDeleteTechnorati, Once Near Death, Focuses On Quality
http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/01/technorati-claims-relevancy-focus-on.html
Don't know the specifics yet, their "claim" process simply looks for a unique key - once crawled and verified, they then manually review sites to ensure they're not spam. At that point (I think) they start crawling the site, topically sorting blogs and surfacing content for visitors to their site.
ReplyDeleteI understand the claim code is the mechanism Technorati chose to verify blog ownership, just thinking: I wonder if rel=me links would be sufficient verification for this. Your blog could tie back to something which you can OAuth, to prove ownership to Technorati.
ReplyDeleteHi Rick;
ReplyDeleteGald you met them! Technorati Site have lost the charm it used to have.
Perhaps i guess if it get connected with blogger..it might just outshine!
Bwt: I want to know why have you got this DISQUS comment box. Is it really good!
if so..then why dont blogger merge with it! It will be really good for the loyal bloggers.
Moreover, the birthday celebration of blogger is still on..so bring on more gifts for us!
Do revert back with your response!
Keep the spark Alive..
They also run a fledgling blog ad network, which I've been part of maybe 18 months. And purchased a blog ad platform of some sort as well. Not sure how or if this is or will be all integrated into their larger vision. We could probably use a bit more synergy.
ReplyDeleteThey have a spider? Interesting.
ReplyDelete