Technorati Blog

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.

Today we’ve made some significant enhancements to Technorati.com: you’ll now notice search is front and center along with what we hope you’ll find to be an easier navigation. We’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 you’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).

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. Technorati’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. We’re laying off six employees today – including two executives -- and there are two additional departures we won’t replace. These are high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now. They’re also friends, and we’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.

Technorati has a number of initiatives in the works to improve the data in our search indexes and analytics systems. Web spam sites (splogs) have long been an issue that we've been working to address. The days when pings came only from legitimate blogs are long gone. Including all of the spam and duplicates, Technorati receives over 8 million pings per day. Over 90% are recognized and blocked as soon as they're received. The remainder is allowed into the system and selectively processed - a large portion is determined to be spam later.

Recently, we've been focusing on link farms and pornography sites that have been getting into the system. Link farms are networks of sites linking to each other and other sites with the intention of raising search rankings. Sometimes, these sites link to legitimate blogs to "camouflage" these intentions or simply because the content has been stolen from another site. During a recent scrub of the system, a number of legitimate blogs were misidentified as spam. The flags set on those blogs were reversed, so going forward they are being indexed correctly again. However, some of the link and post data scrubbed from our search and analytics systems could not be reverted. We're working on upgrades to make that data handling better managed but in the meantime, there are some gaps in certain blog's data which may affect the authority of blogs they linked to. Additionally, some blogs suffered authority drops due to being the beneficiary of camouflaged links from spam sites being removed (wittingly or not); when those spam sites were removed, so was a portion of the authority of the legitimate blogs they linked to.

We have a number of technology initiatives in the works to improve the scaling characteristics and data quality of our systems. More news will be arriving on that in the weeks and months ahead.

I guess you could say we’re on a bit of a roll. In June, we launched Technorati Media, our ad network. At the end of August, we acquired BlogCritics, a great site and community of blog authors. Today, we’re launching a private alpha of Technorati Engage, a self-service advertising network for blogs and social media sites.

Step one for Technorati Media was to get the network up and running with a smaller group of bloggers. But our ultimate goal is to help bloggers at all levels make money, while at the same time creating an effective and safe vehicle for brand advertisers.

So step two is to open up something that works for everyone, and that is ideally suited to the long tail. While the audiences here are smaller, the levels of engagement, influence and expertise in the audience can be exponentially higher. It’s also an incredibly challenging space for advertisers to target and buy. With Technorati Engage, advertisers can very easily achieve the necessary levels of targeting and critical mass.

To help power this new platform, we’ve acquired AdEngage, an online advertising network and advertising exchange.

AdEngage has been running since 2004, serves more than 12 billion ad impressions across more than 4,000 sites, and has grown rapidly each year since its inception. They’ve established a good reputation with publishers: dependable, accessible, and they pay on time. They’ve built an interface that is very easy to use for advertisers and publishers.
Most importantly, AdEngage was founded by the publisher of an independent site, who was fed up with his ad network, expressly for publishers of independent sites. It’s designed from the ground up with your challenges in mind.

So when will all of this happen?

First we’re launching the Technorati Engage private alpha, which offers AdEngage’s existing text and PhoText products. Next month, with the public beta launch, we’ll add a 125x125 square, which is one of the leading ad formats in the blogosphere. We’ll quickly move to full display capabilities, with the most popular IAB display ad sizes becoming available for Q1.

How will this work?

You simply enter into the exchange, are reviewed to ensure your site meet Technorati’s content quality standards, and your inventory is made available. We’re reviewing and evaluating the applying blog and social media sites before they are accepted, as well as only giving access to qualified advertisers, to ensure a safe place for brand and engagement marketing. Advertisers are then able to directly target, buy, create, and see the performance of their ads. You can sign up now and come back and grab the ad code next month.

While Technorati Engage will focus on blogs and social media, AdEngage will continue to operate as a standalone entity and grow its existing business with its current self-serve advertising network.

On October 1st, we’re teaming up to support DonorsChoose.org in their 2nd Annual Blogger Challenge DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to getting our kids the materials, resources and experiences they need to learn. They’re challenging the blogosphere to compete to see who can rally the most support for public schools. Across the blogosphere, bloggers are creating giving pages that list specific classroom requests in public schools--and then encouraging their readers to donate to those classroom requests.

Technorati is sponsoring the "generosity rankings" – which also means that at the end of the challenge we’ll be broadcasting the results showing which bloggers drove the most generosity. You can see the current giving contest here.

During the last DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge, blog readers donated $420,000 toward classroom projects benefitting 75,000 students in low-income communities. This year, the need is even more urgent: the rough road ahead for the US economy means an even rougher road for public schools. With your participation, you and your readers can help thousands of public school kids. It’s easy:

HOW YOUR BLOG CAN HELP

1. Pick a few classroom requests posted on DonorsChoose.org and add them to a challenge page which takes 1-2 minutes to set up.

2. Do a post on October 1 encouraging your readers to donate to any of the classroom requests on each of your challenge page. Your readers can give as little as $5.

3. Publish a widget which pulls in the classroom requests you have selected and shouts out the readers who have donated to those requests. Simply select the category to which your blog belongs to grab the appropriate widget.

If you have additional questions or need help getting started, feel free to contact DonorsChoose.org directly at bloggers@DonorsChoose.org.

BACKGROUND ON THE CHARITY
DonorsChoose.org grew out of a high school in the Bronx where teachers saw their students going without the materials needed to learn. Our website provides an easy way for everyday people to address this problem. Public school teachers post project requests that range from a $100 classroom library, to a $600 digital projector, to a $1,000 trip to the zoo. People like you can choose which projects to fund and then get photos and thank-you letters from the classroom.

BACKGROUND ON THE 2008 DONORSCHOOSE.ORG BLOGGER CHALLENGE
In October of 2007, bloggers competed to see who could rally the most support for public schools via DonorsChoose.org. Blog readers gave $420,000 to classroom projects benefitting 75,000 students in low-income communities. While A-list bloggers like Engadget and TechCrunch inspired great generosity, smaller blogs with really engaged readers generated even more! In fact, it was a personal blog from Brooklyn, TomatoNation who brought in a whopping $100,000.

Thank you so much for your support.

I’m very happy to announce that we released the 2008 State of the Blogosphere report this morning. If you missed my talk at Blog World Expo on Saturday, you can see the study here.

We’ve been publishing this report since Dave Sifry wrote the first one in 2004.
This year, we wanted to go beyond the numbers and deliver deeper insights into bloggers and the state of blogging today. In addition to analyzing the data from the Technorati Index, for the first time, we’ve reached out to the blogosphere to understand the role of blogging in their lives; tools, time and resources used for their blogs; and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally and financially.

So what did Technorati measure this year and why?

There’s a wide range of estimates of the number of global blogs as well as blog readership (including ours), but all the numbers agree that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. Further, as the blogosphere grows in size and influence, the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream site become less clear. Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the blogosphere.

We feel that the real story now lies with the Active Blogosphere. The trends, stories and behaviors here influence not only the rest of the blogosphere but mainstream media as well.

Technorati defines the Active Blogosphere as: The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

So how do we determine who’s active? Some blogs are more integral to the blogosphere than others: How frequently does this blog post? Is this blog linking to others and are others linking to it? Does this blogger post original, opinion, or reactive content? These are all factors that factor into a blog’s authority and determine its place in the active blogosphere.

In short, these are the bloggers that are making the space tick.

The study goes live over the course of this week:

Live today: Overview, and Who are the Bloggers?
Tuesday: The What and Why of Blogging
Wednesday: The How of Blogging
Thursday: Blogging for profit
Friday: Brands in the blogosphere

Late last week part of our indexing system underwent a brief outage. During that time a number of blogs experienced a halt in indexing. Since then, fixes have been implemented and indexing is occurring again. However, because of the outage, a backlog has built up in our spider queues. The spider queues keep track of pings as they come in, so no pings were lost, we just have to process them.

We are catching up as quickly as we can, but in the meantime, please expect delays in indexing, particularly for those on the Blogspot and Wordpress blog platforms. We appreciate your patience as we catch up and thank you for your understanding.

Today, we’ve announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org. If you’re a blogger, you might be familiar with them (and they’ve been part of the Technorati Media network since June). If you’re not, Blogcritics is an online community of thousands of bloggers, and an award winning site. They’re publishing everything from music reviews to articles on politics and technology – to a monthly audience of more than a million.

Why did we do it? It just made sense – as we’ve stated more times than you probably care to hear, our mission is to help bloggers and the people who read blogs. Blogcritics shares this mission, executed in their own unique way by providing a large stage for bloggers to express themselves while giving readers a great array of high quality blog content.

What’s in it for us? Blogcritics brings us closer to an open community of bloggers and the audience that follows them. It also gives us a lot more advertising inventory. What’s in it for them? Our combined resources will help that community grow and expose their work to an even wider audience. We’ll also work more closely with Blogcritics authors so they can monetize their own blogs. What’s in it for our advertisers? They’ll be able to run more fully integrated programs across the site and its related blogs.

I’m thrilled to welcome Blogcritics and their great community of bloggers to the Technorati team. We’re excited at what the coming months hold for both properties.

We're committed to improving our search results and the overall user experience and are taking steps to reduce the amount of spam and non-blog entries that make it into the Technorati index. We’ve made some improvements in how we identify legitimate blogs in order to filter out the spam.

What was the problem?

Large volumes of splogs (spam blogs) and non-blogs ping us in ever increasing numbers. While only a small percentage get through our filters, it is still enough to negatively impact the Technorati experience for everyone. Splogs can show up in search results and blog reactions. Additionally, the high volume of junk pings slows down our systems.

What does this mean for me?

New blogs

In the past, simply pinging Technorati initiated an indexing of a site. This open door policy meant a lot of splogs and non-blogs would enter the system and masquerade as blogs. In order to better filter out spam as well as inadvertent pings to Technorati, we have implemented a few simple review measures to evaluate a site prior to indexing it as a blog.

The review process entails verifying that the site falls within the Technorati Blog Quality Guidelines.

Existing, indexed blogs

As an active blogger already in the Technorati index, we will continue to crawl and index your blog as before. We hope that your Technorati experience will improve. Our service should be faster, search results and blog reactions should be cleaner, and the number of legitimate blogs accidentally caught by our spam filters should decrease.

Links from new sites will be attributed to blog reactions and Technorati Authority when the new site is approved and indexed.