Technorati

Technorati

URL	http://www.technorati.com/
Type of site	blog search engine
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Dave Sifry
Created by	Dave Sifry
Launched	November 2002[1]
Alexa rank	641 (September 2009)
Current status	active

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. By June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.^[2] The name Technorati is a portmanteau of the words technology and literati, which invokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism.

Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry and its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, USA. Tantek Çelik was the site's Chief Technologist.

Technorati uses and contributes to open source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Sifry is a major open-source advocate, and was a founder of LinuxCare and later of Wi-Fi access point software developer Sputnik. Technorati includes a public developer's wiki, where developers and contributors collaborate, also various open APIs.

The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show.^[3] It was also nominated for a 2006 Webby Award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps.^[4]

Technology

Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites. These tags help categorize search results, with recent results coming first^{[citation needed]}.

Technorati rates each blog's "authority", the number of unique blogs linking to the blog over the previous six months.

Criticism

In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which then claimed to track 27.7 million blogs, did not take into account MySpace blogs, of which she said there were 56 million. As a result, she said that the utility of Technorati as a gauge of blog popularity was questionable.^[5] However by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace blogs.^[6]

In May 2006 Technorati teamed up with the PR agency Edelman. The deal earned a lot of criticism, both on principle and as a result of Edelman's 2006 fake blog scandals. Edelman and Technorati officially ended the deal in December 2006. That month, Oliver Reichenstein pointed out that the so called "State of the Blogosphere" was more of a PR-tool and money maker for Edelman and Technorati than a reliable source, explaining in particular a) why Technorati/Edelman's claim that "31% of the blogs are written in Japanese" was "bogus" and b) where the financial profit for the involved parties was in this. ^[7]

In May 2007, Andrew Orlowski writing for the tech tabloid The Register criticized Technorati's May 2007 redesign. He suggests that Technorati has decided to focus more on returning image thumbnails rather than blog results. He also claims that Technorati never quite worked correctly in the past and that the alleged refocus is "a tacit admission that it's given up on its original mission".^[8]

References

External links

• Technorati Home Page
• Technorati's own blog
• Technorati management team official page, reference for much of the above
• Giga OM's entry on the end of the Technorati-Edelman deal
• Technorati's 2008 State of the Blogoshpere Report