Sifry’s Alerts

Had a wonderful weekend enjoying the lush Northern California spring up in the redwoods. One of the joys is just slowing down and breathing the clear, crisp, fresh air, full of Oxygen – you can just feel the difference, even if San Francisco is one of the top cities in terms of air quality, it still is just fresher up in the mountains.

And spring is absolutely bursting up there – this picture was taken in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, which was as lush as I’ve ever seen it. It was wonderful to go walking with a tripod and a basic 50mm lens, and to just slow down, breathe, and find just the right shot. This one had it all for me – the moss-covered log, the clover, and the tiny blue wildflowers just bursting through the ground – you could almost hear them growing, pushing through the earth, enjoying their life. If you like the shot, go and download the original size – I just love the details in this shot.

Technorati Tags: clover, henrycowell, mountains, norcal, park, photography, wildflower, quantcast, redwoods, spring

The good news just keeps on coming here at Technorati. I’m so excited to let you know that the legendary technology investment pioneer Sanford “Sandy” Robertson has joined our Board of Directors, effective immediately.

I met Sandy in January at the World Economic Forum, where, much to my delight, we formed a fast friendship. The better we got to know one another, the more I became convinced Sandy would be an incredible addition to the Board leadership at Technorati.

Sandy is a principal of Francisco Partners, which is one of the world’s largest technology buyout funds. Prior to founding Francisco Partners, Sandy was the founder and chairman of Robertson, Stephens & Co., which most of you will remember was the leading technology investment bank formed in 1978, and sold to BankBoston in 1998. Since then, Sandy has been an active technology investor and advisor to a number of amazing technology companies, and currently serves on the boards of the Democratic Leadership Council, Dolby Laboratories, Inc., Pain Therapeutics, Inc., salesforce.com, Inc., and the Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving

Perhaps most interesting to me, he has had significant financing involvement, including IPOs and secondary financings in more than 500 growth technology companies throughout his career, including 3Com Corporation, America Online, Inc., Applied Materials, Inc., Ascend Communications Inc., Dell Computer Corporation, E*Trade Securities, Inc., Siebel Systems, Inc. and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

I’m really looking forward to learning from Sandy – he immediately struck me with his personal charisma, integrity, deep experience, and insightful business mind. As we continue our growth, Sandy’s sage advice and wealth of experience will prove invaluable to our growth and future success. Welcome aboard!

Technorati Tags: board, bod, mentor, sandy, sandyrobertson, technorati

I’m excited to be working with the folks at the Friends of the Urban Forest to help promote their Arcadia Art Auction that is happening this weekend, and I’m tickled to announce that one of my photographs was selected to be shown and auctioned as well.

This is a framed, signed archival print in a numbered series of 50. I made it during a trip to Yosemite last summer, just as the final snow melt was occurring at Tioga Pass.

The Friends of the Urban Forest is a great organization – they go out and plant trees in cities, helping to keep our earth cooler, creating shade, and making our cities more beautiful. There’s lots of beautiful art available at the auction, and tickets aren’t very expensive. If you live in the San Francisco bay area, go out this Sunday or Monday and show your support for the folks that help to keep our wonderful city green.

If you’re outside the area but want to bid, you can get the absentee bid form.

Technorati Tags: arcadia, arcadia2007, art, friendsoftheurbanforest, fuf, photography, auction

Experimenting with the Zone System on an early morning in Portland, OR. Sometimes all the pieces just come together – and sometimes you wait patiently for the shot. This one was the latter – I loved the composition, and knew it had room for one more element – someone crossing the street at the lower left.

Okay, this is exciting and it’s been really hard to keep it a secret until now: Technorati has completed our first major acquisition, a great company called Personal Bee. I’m excited about this for a number of reasons, which I’ll get into in a moment, but let me summarize by saying that Personal Bee is going to add some very powerful and engaging social publishing features to Technorati.com. And, the Bee platform will help expand Technorati’s Conversational Marketing System, our product that helps brands to engage their audience and enter the global conversation. (You can see examples of the system in place on sites like Shut Up And Sing and An Inconvenient Truth)

Now the details: Personal Bee is a media collection platform that enables the each of us to curate and publish our own personal sites around topics, issues, or anything else we choose. It lets anyone (that means you) create and update collections of interesting citizen and mainstream media, publish them to a personal or public page, and start a following. I’ve been using it for a while now and let me tell you: it’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s FUN.

It’s all about democratizing the media. Social media has always been social for the people creating it, and now the people consuming it will get to join the fun. Anyone can be a publisher without having to write a blog, create a video, or anything else. All of us, the people formerly known as the audience, can create and publish collections of many forms of media, and attract our own audience if we choose.

For content creators and brands, recreational and professional alike, this will offer a whole other range of benefits. The Bee platform makes it quick and easy (turnkey, if you will) to create and deploy conversational and informative micro-sites full of dynamic and engaging blog posts, videos, photos, podcasts, and more. It allows these folks to foster communities quickly, and it’ll give them the tools to monitor and manage the ebb and flow of information at their discretion.

Ted Shelton, the founder of Personal Bee
, will be joining the Technorati team as our VP of Business Development and he’ll have an important role helping to bring the two technology platforms together. There’s still a lot of work to be done; lots of code to crunch, and lots of features to deploy. But whether you’re a publisher, a reader, a brand, or all of the above, I hope you’ll view this new range of services as helpful, useful, and more than a little fun, so check back often because great things are happening as we speak.

Links:

• The Personal Bee website
• Personal Bee founder Ted Shelton’s Blog

Technorati Tags: acquisition, personalbee, conversationalmarketing, technorati, tedshelton

It’s been a busy week at Technorati – new widgets, a report on the state of our company and, of course our all new State of the Live Web, which incorporates our original State of the Blogosphere. Even after all that, there’s still one more piece of news I’d like to share with you this week.

I believe in building great companies. And the only way to build a great company is to bring on board the very best and brightest people. In the end, it is the team of people that make a company great, no matter who started it, or however remarkable the original technology innovation. Having the right people in the right job at the right time has been absolutely critical to the success we’ve enjoyed so far. I’ve always believed that if there is a better person for any job here at Technorati, we should do everything in our power to get that person in the door.

As I said earlier this week, we will soon celebrate the 4th anniversary of our incorporation – which seems so amazing to me, especially when I think of just how many “Web 2.0″ companies have either disappeared or been swallowed whole. Here we are, four years later, still standing, still thriving. We’re growing, changing and facing an abundance of new opportunities.

I also shared with you earlier this week about how Technorati has evolved from my original vision of building and providing the world’s best blog search service to one that constitutes a new kind of media company – one that aggregates social media in real time from across the entirety of the Live Web based on the immediate interests and needs of our users. This evolution has been central to the amazing growth we’re experiencing.

So it was at this time of great growth that I approached our Board of Directors about re-examining roles and to talk about ensuring the right people are in the right place in the company, and especially if there was someone out there who could perform the role of CEO better than I could. I’m really proud to have brought us to where we are – with nearly 10 million unique visitors per month, clearly we’re doing something right. But I put forward the question: How are we going to drive that to 100 million visitors per month and beyond? What do we need to really take us up another level? And so we’ve decided to cast our net to see if we can find an incredible, talented woman or man – someone who shares our values and our vision – who is that perfect person to take this company to that level.

I want to be clear: I don’t come to this decision lightly. I’ve thought long and hard about this and believe bringing in new blood may be the best way for us to continue to grow Technorati and to ensure the company soars to ever greater accomplishment. One more thing I want to be clear about: I adore the company I created – after my family, it’s my proudest achievement, and I have no intention of leaving. Like other founders of some of our best-known and legendary technology companies, I intend to play a vital, ongoing role here at Technorati. If anything, I expect to resume a more active role in product development, driving innovation, and listening hard to our users while giving them the best service in the business. Maybe even get in a bit of coding every now and then.

So, now I have an unusual request: We’re looking for world-class candidates. if you know or consider yourself a person who can lead this ground-breaking company to that next great level, I want to hear about it. We’re looking for someone with proven operational experience, ideally in an end-user-facing internet company, who has presided over significant revenue growth and helped to scale the organization, and has had hands-on experience at an executive level leading an IPO. Send an email to jobs@technorati.com with any details you have and a resume or CV. I’ll make sure our professional executive recruiters immediately get the information you share with us together with my thoughts on the recommendation, and all submissions will be held strictly confidential.

My expectation is that this search could take a while – we’re absolutely committed to getting the right person, and not making compromises on that. The board and I agree totally on this, and it is very gratifying to have their unqualified support for me to continue in the CEO job until we find that absolute right person. Throughout the process, I will continue to lead the explosive growth we’re experiencing and demanding only the most amazing results from our equally amazing team here at Technorati. I know all of us here can continue to rely on the good will and best wishes of you, our friends and users, and for all the support I have received these last four years from more people than I can count, I want to say, simply, thank you.

Stay tuned for more great things from Technorati.

Throughout all of this, I am constantly reminded about how lucky I am. There aren’t that many people in the world who get the chance to work with such a wonderful, smart, energetic, and results-driven team like the one we have here at Technorati. I’m constantly humbled by the wealth of experience, energy, and smarts that surrounds me every day. This all flows from our credo, which is to Be of Service, something which, no matter who sits in the CEO chair in the future, will never change.

UPDATE: Techcrunch picked up on this, you can have a read over there.

UPDATE 2: People have been reacting to this post, and have some great stuff out there: Doc Searls, Dorion Caroll, Ian Kallen. Dorion and Ian are employees here at Technorati, BTW. Thanks, guys, your support means a lot.

Technorati Tags: ceo, gratitude, search, technorati