Sifry’s Alerts

Technorati is throwing a party next week at the end of the Supernova conference, and you and your friends are invited! We’ll celebrate the continued extrodinary growth of the blogopshere (doubling every five months!) and new developments at Technorati. We are now an international organization with the introduction of Technorati Japan and more localized sites on the way. We have a brand new web site designed to better serve our users and introduce more people to the world of weblogs and the posts you create daily. We’ve also been hard at work improving our back-end architecture— after all, everything we build is only as good as the foundation on which it’s based.

We’d like to invite you and your friends to House of Shields in downtown San Francisco next Wednesday, June 22, at 6:30 p.m. Whether you are joining us after work or after Supernova we would love to see you and introduce you to some of the things Technorati has been working on and listen to your feedback and comments. And there might also be a few surprises.

House of Shields is located at 39 New Montgomery Street, half a block from BART and directly across the street from Supernova and the Palace Hotel. We hope you can join us for an evening of celebration in this historic San Francisco bar. Please RSVP by sending an e-mail to rsvp@technorati.com so we get a good headcount and plan accordingly.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, houseofshields, party, san francisco, supernova, supernova2005, technorati

Technorati is sending you to BlogHer! Technorati is sponsoring a contest that will bring one lucky female blogger to Silicon Valley for a weekend with fellow female bloggers.

The BlogHer conference and Technorati share a common goal of helping bloggers identify, reach, and grow their audience. We value the individual authors that stand behind each blog presenting his or her unique perspective in the world. We would like to help you continue the conversation with current and future readers through face-to-face learning and discussions.

How has blogging changed your life? Did it lead to a new job, new friends, a new life? How would a trip to Silicon Valley to meet other female bloggers help you accomplish your goals? We want to hear your story!

How to Enter

Tell your personal story on your blog and be sure to tag your post as “TechnoratiBlogHer” so we can find you. The winning entry must be within a claimed member blog. All eligible entries must be posted by Sunday, June 19. The winning entry will be selected by Technorati staff and announced on Wednesday, June 22.

Prize Details

The selected author will receive a flight to the Bay Area, two nights at the Westin Santa Clara hotel complete with in-room Internet access, and registration for the BlogHer conference.

Technorati will pay for your flight from a major air hub in the continental United States (Boston, New York, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle).

Meet Technorati Staff at BlogHer

We hope to see you at the conference! Technorati employees Kevin Marks and Niall Kennedy will be attending BlogHer and look forward to meeting the attendees.

Technorati Tags: contest, member, tags, technorati, TechnoratiBlogHer

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the public beta of this major redesign of the Technorati service. We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we hope we’ve reflected that in this release. We’ve made a big step with this release. Having said that, we also know we have more improvements to make and we’re working hard to implement them. Here are some of the highlights of this beta release:

• We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re different from other search engines.
• We’ve learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
• We now have more powerful advanced search features. You can now click the “Options” link beside any search box for power searching options.
• We’ve added more personalization. Sign in, and you’ll see your current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
• New Watchlist capabilities have been added. For example, you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. Now you can view all of your favorite searches on one page. Of course, you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!

As I mentioned, this beta is now public and available on our Web site at http://beta.technorati.com. I encourage you to check it out and, if you’d like, blog about it.

Please remember, this is a beta. While we’re proud of the improvements we’ve made, we know we’re not totally there. Our response time is not where we want it to be, so you may still experience some slow search responses. Likewise, sorting by authority still still has some hiccups. We know this and we’re working very hard to fix this. We’re working on issues like spam and weeding duplicates from results.

The good news for all of us is that blogging has taken off, and we all benefit from new eyes reading what we write. The pace is staggering: we are tracking somewhere between 800,000 and 900,000 new posts made each day, over 40,000 new weblogs created every day. A year ago, we were growing by a gigabyte a day. Now, we’re growing by a half a terabyte a day. So half the battle is just keeping up with all this explosive growth, and I apologise in advance for when we stumble.

Please keep sending us your feedback! It is invaluable, and has helped us immeasurably to improve the service. There’s still a long way to go, and we have lots more in store for the next few months – and your comments to feedback@technorati.com are the first emails we all check every morning. Please keep us on our toes, and keep telling us how we can continue to improve and be of service to you.

Technorati Tags: beta, blogosphere, givingthanks, gratutude, launch, statistics, stats, tags, technorati, thanks, weblog, weblogs