There�s not much I can say about the economy that hasn�t been said a hundred times already. We�re facing the worst crisis of our lifetimes, and no one can say with certainty what lies ahead or how long it will last.

In spite of these challenging times, Technorati�s prospects haven�t changed, and in fact, have never been brighter. In the past year, we�ve launched several very promising initiatives, and our business has grown significantly. Our overall strategy is not changing, however, the economy has changed dramatically so we�re adjusting to meet it. I�ll start with the bad news so we can end on a somewhat positive note. To ensure we weather the storm, we�re making changes at Technorati.

Unfortunately, this means sacrifices. Technoratiâ��s management team members are taking pay cuts ranging from 15-25% and employees are taking 10% cut. This also includes the reallocation of staff. Weâ��re laying off six employees today â�� including two executives — and there are two additional departures we wonâ��t replace. These are high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now. Theyâ��re also friends, and weâ��re very sad to see them go. We simply need a leaner and reconfigured mix to get us through 2009.

The good news:
The Technorati Media Network launched in June reaches an audience of more than 55 million across more than 60 blog and social media sites. comScore measures 12.5 million US unique visitors, placing us in the top 5 blog properties.

We continue to overhaul our technology infrastructure. The first of many planned improvements to search, indexing and analytics are delivering measurably better service to bloggers and a better experience for Technorati�s readers.

Blogcritics.org, acquired in August, added an open community of bloggers and the audience that follows them and gives us a lot more advertising inventory for the custom and premium programs our brand advertisers demand. The Blogcritics community and their readers continue to grow.

Technorati Engage, a self service advertising platform for blog and social media sites is in beta launch: ads are up and running on more than 25 sites. We�ll open the platform to all bloggers and advertisers in early 2009. AdEngage, our recent acquisition to power Technorati Engage, continues to operate successfully as a standalone entity.

We�re excited about what we�ve accomplished, and we�ve got a great foundation to grow. The team that remains place is incredibly talented and resourceful. We are all owners of this company and understand what we need to do. That doesn�t make it easier. In the long run, Technorati will emerge a stronger and more profitable place for us, and the bloggers we serve, to thrive personally, professionally and financially.

continue reading "Changes and Tough Decisions at Technorati"

Today weâ��ve made some significant enhancements to Technorati.com: youâ��ll now notice search is front and center along with what we hope youâ��ll find to be an easier navigation. Weâ��ve also streamlined our video pages, which highlight the popular videos that bloggers are writing about. But the most significant upgrades are to the tag pages. As the Blogosphere has grown, the use of tags have grown similarly across the Internet; it\’s unusual not to find tags associated with content on the Internet. Tags are what the writer is telling readers their articles are about. At Technorati, we see hundreds of thousands of tagged posts per day.

As youâ��d expect, our new tag pages provide blog posts from across the Blogosphere (with some new tools to filter posts). In addition you\’ll find all kinds of other tagged content including blogs, videos and photos. The tag trend charts now allow comparison so you can compare any given tag to any other. Finally, we\’ve created space for bloggers and blog readers to discuss how the tag influences the Blogosphere, and original articles detailing and defining the tags, authored by category experts from Technorati\’s sister site, Blogcritics. We invite you to both discuss the tags as well as author a tag article by becoming a BlogCritic.

We\’ve been having a lot of fun playing with these new pages while they were in development, whether on major topics like Microsoft or Paris Hilton to more focused topics like South Beach Diet Recipes and Twilight the movie. When you check them out you may discover a great blog you never knew about, while other readers are discovering your blog.

We hope you find Technorati more useful and enjoyable than you found it yesterday. If you would like to give us feedback we\’d be grateful (choose Redesign Feedback option).

continue reading "Some Upgrades to Technorati.com"

There will be a short outage on Monday, December 22 at 2:30 PM PST (22:30 GMT) as Technorati tests some network improvements. We anticipate this will be very brief, 10 minutes maximum, but it will require Technorati to be unavailable to the Internet for a few minutes. Thank you for your patience and for visiting Technorati.

continue reading "Scheduled Maintenance, Monday, December 22, 2008"

Just a heads-up our Ops team will be running another network test today, January 16, at 3:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time (23:00 GMT). There should not be any noticeable downtime to site users, however if there is it should last for a maximum of 10 minutes.

You might have noticed some intermittent loading issues on Technorati.com over the last few days, which turned out to be caused by a network device. It has since been repaired and this test should help insure more reliability moving forward.

continue reading "Technorati.com Network Test - January 16, 2009"

We attended a recent BlogWell conference in October here in the Bay Area. Definitely a worthwhile (and inexpensive) event. One afternoon, 8 case studies, with a pure focus on how large, public corporations are tackling the social media space.

This time around, Walmart, The Home Depot, Allstate, H&R Block, Mayo Clinic, Sharpie, Procter and Gamble, and the U.S. Coast Guard are presenting case studies.

Register using the code technoratirocks for 15% off the price of a conference pass.

BlogWell: How Big Companies Use Social Media
Chicago - January 22, 2009
www.gaspedal.com/blogwell

continue reading "If You\’re in Chicago, a Social Media Conference Well Worth Attending"

Blogcritics Politics Editor Dave Nalle will be leading a live blog and chat of this historic presidential inauguration, which will also include a live video feed of the event. The live video feed starts at 9am, the serious discussion starts around 11am EST, but feel free to stop in and discuss the parade in the morning.

Participation is open to all comers. You can find it here.

continue reading "Liveblog the Inauguration with BlogCritics"

In his inaugural speech, President Obama called all Americans to action, to take responsibility for lifting the United States and the world from the stifling shadow of greed, conflict and darkness. This will doubtless be recounted as one of the most stirring inaugurations in history. As we have all witnessed, Barack Obama knows how to deliver an inspiring speech, he proved with the change.gov website (that now directs readers to the White House site) that he knows how to listen.

One of the first things to notice about the new administration\’s promised transparency and accountability is the new White House Blog. Being interested in those things, I noticed that the blog follows some unusual technical practices, ones that historically Technorati would not have been able to index accurately. However, change has not only come to Washington, change is afoot in the back-end systems at Technorati. As one steeped in the specifics of Technorati\’s crawler overhaul, I couldn\’t resist putting the pieces in place to enable crawling the White House Blog; with the new crawler we\’re rolling out, the customization needed was a piece of cake.

Little more than half a day since its inception, the White House Blog is rising in authority very rapidly; its presently ranked 6789 and continues its climb. Today was a great day for America, the world and the blogosphere. Technorati will be watching the new administration\’s social media initiatives and doing what we can to help connect you to them. In the meantime, watch for more developments at Technorati and let us know what you think. We\’re listening.

continue reading "Welcome To The Blogosphere, Mr. President"

The theme of this year�s Web 2.0 Expo is The Power of Less.

�2009 will be a tough year in many ways, but now more than ever, the core concepts of Web 2.0 provide an advantage. Lightweight tools, user interfaces, and development models will help streamline productivity and focus resources; new business models will emerge out of the environment of change. Transparency and openness will help avoid disasters and extend our influence, as we learn to trust users as co-developers. Marketers can�t afford to ignore the value of social media, communities, and a new set of analytics. On an individual, team, company, and global level, this is the year we will choose to work on what matters.�

In the spirit of The Power of Less, we�ve got passes to give away:

These are Conference Plus Workshops passes that get you into EVERYTHING.

Enter to win by going to Technorati\’s Twitter page and posting to our @replies.

Web 2.0 Expo
march 31-april 3
San Francisco

continue reading "Weâ��ve Got Web 2.0 Passes to Give Away"

“Companies should inform, with a real commitment to speed, the conversations among the new influencers — always under way on blogs, in discussion forums, and bulletin boards.”
2009 Edelman Trust Barometer

Last week, Edelman released their annual Trust Barometer.
No surprise — consumer trust in business and institutions is at an all time low.

Trust in U.S. business — at 38% down from 58% last year — is the lowest in the Barometerâ��s 10-year history. 77% of consumers said they refused to buy products or services from a distrusted company. Mainstream media fared worse: only 36% trust TV news, and only 34% trust newspapers. Who DO we trust? Experts and peers.

Where do you find experts and peers? The blogosphere. How to rebuild? The qualities companies need to embrace to succeed in 2009 are inherent to the blogosphere: transparency, word of mouth, and trust.

Bloggers themselves (60%) place the most trust in what they�re hearing in the blogosphere. 90% of them are writing about brands. Right now, bloggers (and their audiences) want straight talk and something to believe in, and they need to know you�re still in business.

If this is the year of getting back to basics, here are the most basic things you can do:

Listen: monitor what�s being said about your brand, your products, your competitors, and your blog posts.

Technorati advanced search
With advanced search you can track who is talking about you and your competitors in the same breath. You can see the blogosphere�s reaction to articles about you, or your blog posts.

Watchlists let you track any subject. Simply give Technorati a few words or website URLs you\’re interested in, and we\’ll tell you whenever they\’re mentioned.

Favorites let you track, organize and filter your favorite blogs.

Tag pages:
You�ll find these when you click on a tag. Or, to automatically generate a tag page about anything, simply enter Technorati.com/tag/ and any topic you can think of. Once you�re there, you�ll see all of the content in the blogosphere around that tag: posts, videos, images and a chart of the tag�s popularity over time. You can even plot multiple tags against each other.

Communicate: � one to one, one to many � but go where the conversations are. Blog, comment, comment back to the people who are commenting on you. Participate in the conversations that are already taking place in the blogosphere every day.

Or just be present in environments of relevance and trust. Advertising in the blogosphere has come a long way and now offers everything from display and rich media to formats such as conversational media, designed specifically to harness the power of the blogosphere.

continue reading "Trust"

We�re very pleased to announce a great new service to allow bloggers and writers to express themselves to millions, gain exposure and promote their expertise � publishing original tag articles and blurbs on technorati.com. After a successful beta, bloggers and authors can now write original Wikipedia-style tag articles and reference blurbs and have them appear on Technorati.com tag pages. Tag pages compile content from the blogosphere (posts, photos, videos, blogs) around any tag. A tag article provides an overview of the tag, and the relevance of the tag topic to the blogosphere.

For example:

technorati.com/tag/health
technorati.com/tag/music

This is a unique opportunity for authors, brands, agencies, experts and content sites with some significant benefits. Your tag article will appear on Technorati.com with a writer credit. You will be seen as the definitive expert on a tag subject � by millions of readers. Your article can include links to useful references and sites, including your own, if relevant, as well as your own byline link. It�s also really easy to contribute: tag articles are only 2-3 paragraphs, between 100 and 200 words, and can live for years as evergreen content.

You can also submit additional content and references to Technorati tag pages via Blurbs, which can be added directly on the page. Blurbs also link back to relevant sites or your Technorati profile where readers can see your blogs, other blurbs, watchlists and favorites. To start contributing blurbs, you do need to join Technorati, but you don�t need to be a blogger to join.

To start contributing tag articles, sign up at BlogCritics (or sign up via the tag page itself).

Once you�ve received your login, claim the tag for the article you wish to contribute. You can claim an existing tag or create a new one.

tag article blog post images - Get more Business Documents

When you�re ready to submit your article, here are a few more guidelines:

Create an informative summary (what is it, what are bloggers saying about it?) � not a sales pitch. Links should lead to other content, not promotional or e-commerce destinations. Most importantly, articles need to be original content to keep the emphasis on fresh content and individual voices.

Once you�re signed up to publish on www.technorati.com, you�re also able to publish articles on BlogCritics, our interactive community and a full service news and reviews source. Every week, thousands of writers deliver hundreds of stories: news, opinions, and reviews on music, books, film, TV, pop culture, products, technology, and politics

continue reading "Weâ��re Launching Original Tag Articles and Blurbs on Technorati.com"