Technorati Archive

PE Hub reported today that Technorati just got another round of investment – this time it’s a $7.5 million on a Series D. Now they have about $30 million from investors including: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation.

Technorati continues to disappoint me with their inaccurate blog scoring and their poor blog search. I still believe half of their servers are not updating properly. Sometimes when you visit a blog’s stats page, you get nothing, sometimes you get a higher score than "normal" and other times you get half of the page.  

Dan Frommer reports that after the announcement the Technorati service went down from massive traffic. He believes that many people went to the site after many years of ignoring it, assuming it was dead.

CEO Richard Jalichandra seems to do a good job of hitting the party and event circuit so perhaps that helped the company to receive the funding. Last year I wrote a column at BlogWorld about Jalichandra where I said he "blew it." Though on the positive side, he did try to friend me on LinkedIn last month. Last year, I even offered the company five suggestions to immediately improve Technorati.

Perhaps Technorati and Alexa should merge?

Technorati has announced that the account you setup on Technorati can now be used as an OpenID provider. Ian demonstrates how to use your Technorati profile to authenticate a blog on Google’s Blogger service.

I am pretty sure I would never use my Technorati profile to authenticate as an OpenID provider, but it’s a good marketing bit. It’s a good way to show that your profile could be used in this manner — something many might not know about (I didn’t). Technorati also began supporting OpenID for profile creation in October 2007.

Another update they have made over the past day which I do find beneficial is the addition of a URL link on the authority pages. In the past, some of the headlines linked directly to a site, but the majority of the time, the story linked to the site’s Technorati profile. This was a huge frustration factor for me as I want to see what the site says about me or a client, not the site’s profile page. Now (as shown below) they have the link to the profile and directly below it the full URL linked to the actual site. Bravo!

Yesterday we discussed the new version of Technorati and I concluded that I was confused by the new features. Even created a nifty video to demonstrate my confusion. Today my buddy Molly (aka DemoGirl) has created a demo of the new Technorati and also attempts to help clear up my confusion. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her say "I think" as is she isn’t sure either!

No idea if the Technorati team had anyone externally test and review the new version but it certainly doesn’t appear that way. Dorion/Richard, any input here on how you developed the new version?

One of the questions I had was around the section on the right called "Contributing bloggers". I wondered how those blogs got listed. Molly thinks it’s random – which I don’t agree with after seeing "Fergie’s Tech Blog" listed on there every time I visit the page since launch.

Check out Molly’s video – it’s a better demo than mine and explains the updates pretty well.

Technorati relaunched the core of their site today with a "focus on bloggers and advertisers," says Michael Arrington of Techcrunch. We’ve already learned over the past couple of months that new CEO Richard Jalichandra cares about all blogs but really cares about his Top 100. Is this relaunch a way to highlight the big blogs in an attempt to drive more advertising? Not sure frankly.

There are some good updates it seems – like moving to show the hot posts around the net, etc. I’ve gone through the service and the only word that comes to mind is: CONFUSION. I even created a video to demonstrate my confusion – it’s below.

• What’s the difference between a blog and a news site?
• Why is does it say "percolating the latest blog posts" but then talks about news stories?
• What is an attention link and how does it differ from a reaction?
• What is a contributing blogger? Is it someone who writes content or someone who works for Technorati?
• Are these top stories or rising? If rising, how does one appear here? Some of the top stories in each category have one link. Are these hand-picked by Technorati or is it algo-based?
• No feeds for the categories?

Can Technorati regain it’s foothold in blog search and ranking? Leave your thoughts in the comments after you watch my confusing video.

Last week we learned that Technorati has taken blog posts older than six months out of their online index claiming that it was a part of their "economization" plan. Tonight I see that they are only displaying inbound links up through approximately 30 days ago. Counts have dropped dramatically overall. I always liked Technorati for the ability to look back in time (since CN began) and see who linked to what posts. That is gone now. I sure hope it’s a bug.

I hope we get some clarification from Technorati as to what is going on with these link counts and how they will affect authority figures since those are based on six-month figures. Please report in if you are seeing the same thing on your site. So far I have tested 10 sites and all are in the same ~30 day link display period.

Wouldn’t this have been a good topic to discuss along with other planned changes at BWE? 

One of the discussions I was looking forward to at BlogWorldExpo was the "new media moguls" panel. The panel included the CEOs from b5media (Jeremy Wright), Pajamas Media (Roger Simon), Technorati (Richard Jalichandra) and a Director from Weblogs. The panel was moderated by Jason Shellen, a former Google employee who seemed very nervous during the chat. I was most interested in hearing from Richard as he has been in the Technorati CEO position for about a month or so and it was his first chance to meet a good landscape of users. Frankly, he blew it.

First a note. Moderator Jason focused almost the entire time exclusively on Pajamas and b5media. Third place for mic time went to AOL and last was Technorati. This made it a bit difficult for Richard to discuss Technorati’s plans but I believe he had a responsibility to speak up. This is the first part of how he blew his chance to win us all over.

Technorati gets bashed almost daily by someone and I have written about my dislikes in the past as well. From their inability to count links, to 0′s all around, to the WTF, everyone is wondering what’s up over there. Richard continued to leave us wondering what’s in it for them. While leaving the room, another attendee commented to me, "Who cares about Technorati anymore?". Maybe it’s no surprise that the large Technorati booth was empty most of the time.

The little that he did speak (along with his blog posts) made one thing clear: he is most interested in the Top 100 and their opinion of Technorati. He tried to back up but wasn’t able to do so even saying, "most of you in this room are included in the Tecnorati databsae." Most of you? Why would anyone attending this conference not be included? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

In business, it’s important to treat your best customers best. We did that at my previous employer. But why would a blog at number 30 be more important for Technorati than a blog at 30,000 or 3 million? The higher rated blogs aren’t "helping" Technorati’s bottom line any more than the other blogs are.

Richard, I sure hope we will hear more from you on what Technorati’s plans are besides only showing interest in the Top 100 and removing posts after 6 months. It would be good to see Technorati succeed and to turn around the negativity that is the current Technorati vibe. Perhaps you could start with my 5 Quick Suggestions for Improving Technorati.

With new CEO Richard Jalichandra in place a week now and an interview under his belt, I thought it would be a good time for me to provide Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Technorati.

Suggestion #1 – Focus on the house

In an interview with Wired, Richard said his goal in the next year is to "build a WUME (wholly unique media experience)". I would suggest Richard take some time personally (not using interns) to review all of the current feedback from bloggers across the spectrum about their thoughts on Technorati. Richard can start with our Technorati coverage over the past year. The current "house" is not in order – counts aren’t correct, blogs aren’t updated correctly and there are lots of other small issues which seem to frustrate the blogosphere. Fix those first Richard as more positive bloggers talking about Technorati will help your WUME, otherwise it will hurt your chances.

Suggestion #2 – Realize that you track x million blogs

In your first blog post Richard, you mention going to the Top 100 and asking for advice first. What about the other x million blogs you track? The top 100 is not a sales contest with you discussing revenue projections with your best salespeople. Goes back to what I said in Suggestion #1 above – you’ve got a branding issue – something more than the Top 100 are needed to fix. Especially since the Top 100 might not even be correct given the tracking issues :)

Suggestion #3 – Kill off the WTF immediately

I hope you kill off the WTF feature of Technorati. Since Topics was added, WTF is not needed, it’s a joke among bloggers and appears to receive very little traffic and votes per story. Not to mention that a large percentage of the submitted stories are spam and porn.

Suggestion #4 – Upgrade the Customer Service

In my customer service test last year, Technorati scored the lowest with an F overall. Recently when I inquired about a few topics, the autoreply said basically, "we are busy, if we can get to it, we will. If we don’t, feel free to nudge us and we might possibly reply". Richard, I would suggest you do some anonymous testing yourself to verify the level of service provided.

Suggestion #5 – Create incoming tracking alerts

One of the small features I’d love to see is a way for an alert (sms/email/twitter) each time someone links to one of my stories. This is different than the alerts that Google provides and could become a good way to drive blogger traffic back to Technorati. Offer up a nice widget and a Facebook application as well and it’s a way for visibility for your brand. Allow me to create the same alerts for my brand competitors.

Quick Conclusion

As you can see, all of my suggestions will help lead to greater blogger acceptance levels. Improvement in the blogger acceptance level is critical before rolling out new features. It’s time for you to join the conversation and since you are fresh meat, it’s a great time. Good luck Richard and I look forward to watching your journey back.