Written on August 26, 2008 – 5:41 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
It hasn’t appeared on the Technorati blog yet, but Michael Arrington broke the news: Technorati has acquired BlogCritics, a 6-year old blog network that draws around 1 million unique monthly visitors who watch 3 to 4 million pages.
In June, Technorati launched a blog advertising network called Technorati Media. CEO Richard Jalichandra wrote in the announcing blog post that “over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals.” Seems like he did just now, only in a slightly less orthodox way.
Where one would expect Technorati to focus on some sort of affiliate program, it just buys a network which gives them enough space and pageviews to place ads on. According to Crunchbase, BlogCritics has published 73,000 articles from 2,300 authors. Exactly, those bloggers are from the mid and long tail.
Jalichandra told Arrington that they will probably acquire more content sites soon. Well, truth be told, it’s a efficient way of building a solid blog ads network, that’s for sure. Although it does bring up an interesting question, is Technorati is a search company, or a media company? When choosing for the latter, who will guarantee me that Technorati search results aren’t biased?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 18, 2008 – 8:57 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
One of the last sessions at Supernova 2008 was about “liquid conversations” - the discussions flow away from their original source to services like Friendfeed and Facebook. Dave McClure (500 Hats) moderated the panel of David Sifry (Technorati), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Matt Colebourne (CoComment), and Loic Le Meur (Seesmic). I’m not sure McClure knew in advance that this would be not easy as he thought it would be. Here’s what happened.
Each panelist introduced himself and the service he was representing. After some regular introductions by Sifry, Taylor, Colebourne, it was up to Le Meur. He decided to pitch Seesmic by showing a video about the… infamous g-spot. The video was compiled of video replies by Seesmic users from ten different countries and a sex expert - the hilarious type. Here’s the video.
The video was welcomed with several rounds of laughing, although I did noticed some people were a bit shocked. Yes, that’s what happens when the French arrive. Some prejudices are actually based on something.
Valleywag reporter Melissa Gira - “Reporter, Bad Girl, Sex Nerd For Hire” - asked a good question about the video - after answering a question about g-spots. She wondered why Seesmic invites an expert to the video, when the service is all about the conversations of their users. Loic didn’t really give an answer, so I will: It’s a great marketing tool to turn the comments into a show and spice it up with a typical weird sex expert.
Now over to the liquid conversations
Enough for the sex part now, as McClure raised an interesting question about online conversations. They’re flowing away from their original source to places like Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter. Friendfeed users aren’t commenting on a New York Times article on the site itself, but express their opinion in Friendfeed. They find like-minded friends there, instead of the railing crowd at the New York Times page. The same thing happens with discussions on blogs - to the discontent of some bloggers. (more…)
According to Technorati there are more than 120 million blogs, up from 100,000 in 2003. Starting a blog is easy but maintaining it is harder. Only 7 million are actively updated at least every 3 months.
“Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.”
As you know this blog is updated every day and 7 days a week since we officially launched on January 7, 2008 and it seems that we are doing a good job because today we entered the ‘top 5000′ of the most authoritative blogs in the world.
We still have a long way to go (our rank is Rank: 4,564 so there are still 4463 in front of us) until we make it to the top 100 blogs. But we can dream, right?
Written on February 25, 2008 – 4:55 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some people say that blogging is soo two years ago, I dare to differ. Especially here in Europe, there are lot of opportunities. There still so much people who don’t even know what blog is. And that’s strange, considering the assumption that everybody has at least one hobby or passion. And somewhere, on the web, somebody is writing about that exact same hobby. Who wouldn’t want to read that?
Yet, blogs aren’t that user friendly for the not so web-minded people. How on earth do they find them? Let’s face it, Technorati is just too geeky for your 76-year old neighbor and the Google results are too cluttered. They just don’t even want to know what ‘tags’ or ‘trackbacks’ are.
Now there is Blogged.com, a clean-looking catalog for blogs. Mashable reports that ‘its primary topic is likely going to be the average web user that recognizes blogs too have a wealth of information across various topics’.
So imagine that your neighbor is into cooking, look how easy she can find some interesting blogs about this lovely activity:
Directories with easy interfaces that remind people of magazines and newspaper will the step to the digital world not too big, not even for the elderly. I believe initiatives like Blogged.com contribute to the revolution that is ahead of us. Namely the European mass adoption of the medium blog.
Written on August 26, 2008 – 5:41 pm
In June, Technorati launched a blog advertising network called Technorati Media. CEO Richard Jalichandra wrote in the announcing blog post that “over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals.” Seems like he did just now, only in a slightly less orthodox way.
Written on May 27, 2008 – 2:52 pm
According to Technorati there are more than 120 million blogs, up from 100,000 in 2003. Starting a blog is easy but maintaining it is harder. Only 7 million are actively updated at least every 3 months.
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