Technorati

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. As of August 2007, Technorati indexes over 94 million weblogs. The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati or intellectuals.

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, as well as various open APIs.

The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show.^[1] It was also nominated for a 2006 Webby award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps.^[2]

Criticism

In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which claimed that they track 27.7 million blogs, failed to take into account MySpace blogs, of which she says there are 56 million. As a result, she says the utility of Technorati as a gauge for blog popularity is questionable.^[3] However by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace "blogs".^[4]

In May 2006 Technorati teamed up with the PR agency Edelman. The deal for has earned quite some criticism, in principle as well as in practice due to Edelman's 2006 fake blog scandals. Edelman and Technorati have officially ended the deal in December 2006. In December 2006, 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. ^[5]

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 instead of blog results. He also claims that Technorati never worked in the past and the alleged refocus is "a tacit admission that it's given up on its original mission".^[6]

References

External links

• Technorati
• Technorati's own blog
• Technorati management team official page, reference for much of the above
• Giga OM's entry on the end of the Tecnorati-Edelman deal

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