Sifry’s Alerts

Nice post from a blog that I’ll be watching more closely from now on: Welcome to the World Live Web!

The New Year is almost upon us, which means the Technorati Developers Contest is coming to a close with a midnight, December 31 deadline. This was our first contest and we’ve been very happy with what we’ve seen, and we know there is more to be seen! For those who have submitted and those still coding, I want to make sure you get the support you need, so we’ll be hosting two IRC chats next week before the December 31 deadline. This will be a chance for you to debug, get answers to questions, and get some 1:1 time with Technorati developers.

Here are details about the two chat and some general housekeeping notes:

1. Wednesday, December 29, 7 p.m. PST we’ll have our fist IRC chat on Freenode on channel #technorati (great for those of you in the US and in Asia)

2. Thursday, December 30, 10 a.m. PST we’ll have our second IRC chat again on Freenode on channel #technorati (great for those of you in the US and in Europe)

3. If you developed an application prior to the contest, you are eligible (and encouraged!) to submit it.

4. If you’ve already submitted, code but made some tweaks, you can resubmit. We want your application to be the best it can.

5. We will announce the winners on Friday, January 7.

6. Here’s the URL to the form for submitting code: http://www.technorati.com/developers/contest.html. The form is at the bottom of the page.

Happy Holidays and a big thank you to all of our developers who have created a flurry of great activity around Technorati.

The editors at the Guardian Newspaper in the UK have released their best of 2004 picks, and Technorati is among the winners in the Blogs category:

Typepad has unseated Blogger.com as our favourite personal publishing tool. Like Blogger, it will also host your site – although you have to pay – but it will let you transfer your own domain name over too. A high level of control over content and layout, plus decent default templates top it off. Statcounter shows who’s visiting your site, and helps you understand why they’re there. Technorati lets you see who’s linking to you. Blogdex shows what the blog community is obsessing about. Once you’ve mastered writing a blog, start the radio version with iPodder.org.

Wow, had a great time at the first SF Technorati Users Group (SFTUG) meeting. Many thanks to Niall Kennedy for taking the initiative and setting up the meeting, doing the organizing, and even giving the first (pretty detailed) presentation! We had a pretty good turnout, about 20 people, including a bunch of Technorati folks, and had a great time. Lots of people were interested in Attention.xml, and while Niall didn’t cover it in his presentation, it was a good topic of discussion afterwards. Had a good chance to hang out a bit with Kevin Burton from Rojo and Jonas Luster (who btw, has just added Technorati support to Drupal). To be perfectly frank, I’m humbled. It is a wonderful thing to be part in building something greater than yourself, and it is a somewhat surreal experience to go to a users group meeting of a service that you created. I came back home tonight thinking about it , and in my cosmos was a great post from Jason Dowdell discussing the change in user group topics – from programming languages to platforms, now to services and APIs. To quote James:

So now, instead of developers meeting to discuss a specific language of code, they’re discussing APIs and the possibilities that lie in those APIs. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you see a pattern emerging? Blogs and APIs accomplish the same thing. The common man may be an expert with a single post or a single application. That’s what I call maturing. Yes programming languages and their progression is critical but they’re becoming more and more robust. Allowing smaller and smaller companies to create APIs and benefit from their loyal user communities to get ideas for features and enhancements. That’s going to be the secret sauce of data-centric startups now and possibly for good.

Great points, food for thought. My brain is swimming.

Tonight is the first meeting of Techorati’s first User Group, the San Francisco Techorati User Group (SFTUG!). The meeting will take place at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment (in the loft area) in San Francisco. Niall Kennedy, the TUG founder, will give an overview of Technorati and dive into its APIs. Many of us from Technorati will be there as well.

On behalf of everyone at Technorati, a big thank you to Niall for starting our first ever TUG and we hope to see some of you tonight!

Masahiko Satoh posts an extensive explanation of Technorati in Japanese for folks in Japan trying to understand better what the service does, and how it works. Thanks Masahiko!

Technorati and Digital Garage just announced that we will work together to set up Technorati Japan, which will distribute Technorati services in Japan. Digital Garage is a leading Internet company in Japan, and they’re not novices to search – they were the first to bring over a Japanese internet search engine as a partnership with Infoseek, and they are creators and significant investors in the leading price-watching portal in Japan, Kakaku.com (which means literally, “price dot com” in Japanese). Our VP of International and Mobile Devices, Joi Ito, has a long history with the company as well, as he describes on his blog, and it has been a tremendous pleasure getting to know DG’s cofounder and CEO, Kaoru Hayashi.

With Technorati Japan, we’re going to be bringing Technorati’s scale and expertise in understanding the World Live Web to the Japanese. I used to live and work in Japan, and have warm memories of the people and culture, and I’m looking forward to working with DG to build and grow the business there. There’s a shift that’s happening, as more and more people are connected via broadband and mobile phones and their use of the web becomes even more a part of the social fabric of their lives. We aim to capture and help people make sense of that real-time world of conversations.

So, in real terms, this means that we’ll soon have a Japanese Technorati site for all of the Japanese bloggers. We hope to get the service running sometime next year, but we’re going to get started right away trying to get people to understand what this real-time web and conversation stuff is all about.

Obviously, Japan is just the first step in our international strategy, and I’m quite pleased that this is Joi’s first major international deal for Technorati – it most certainly won’t be his last. And last but not least, I’m excited to have Gen Kanai leading up Technorati Japan. Gen is the perfect bridge for us – a veteran blogger with a foot firmly planted both in the US (he grew up in NY) and in Japan, he previously led internet efforts at Sony and Toyota. I’m really looking forward to be working more closely with Gen, and with the folks at Digital Garage.