Sifry's Alerts

Technorati Tracks Two Million Blogs

At 4:35AM PST today, Technorati broke the 2 Million weblogs tracked milestone. The blogosphere continues to expand at an amazing pace, with about 12,000 new weblogs being created every day. We're tracking over 150,000 weblog updates every day, and growing. One of the reasons for this has been the substantial growth in hosted weblog systems like Typepad, LiveJournal, and Blogger, but also a tremendous amount of growth in smaller systems, like EasyJournal and Suicide Girls and moblogs like TextAmerica. Blogging is also growing outside of the United States and the English-speaking Internet, as we've seen lots of growth in non-English language weblogs as well, especially in Russian, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Farsi.

We've been through 3 complete technical infrastructures, each designed to scale better than the rest, and been through two major site redesigns as well. It's been a pretty crazy fun ride so far, and I look at this as only just beginning.

We've got some more new fun features in the pipeline, and we're building out a great team of folks to help in our core mission: Be of Service. Help keep us on our toes, keep sending us feedback, and keep telling us how we can be of service to you. Thanks for letting us be a part of your lives and for putting up with us when we've had our issues. I'm incredibly grateful to be given the opportunity to build something great with such a wonderful team - both inside and outside of the company. Thanks.

New Technorati beta launches

I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:

1. Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.


2. Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.


3. Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.


4. Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more context-rich, deeper view into the data.


5. BookTalk (formerly called Hot Products), a listing of the most talked-about books, DVDs, and other products in the blogosphere in the last 24 hours.


6. Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog" codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.


7. Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.

A few points to note:

1. Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough. Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.


2. We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or email subscriptions yet.

Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.

Thanks again for all your support.

Working on repairs on cluster3m

I just got here to scottsdale, working on repairs on cluster3m, I'll bring it back up shortly, should be an hour or two, and then I'll bring back the spiders...

Heading to PC Forum

Next stop in the Technorati speaking tour: PC Forum.

I'll be presenting the company on Monday afternoon - a real honor (go to the bottom of the page). We've got some fun new stuff to show off, and I'm tremendously excited to meet the stellar list of attendees Esther and Daphne always bring in. The big news this year is that that CNET has acquired Edventure Holdings, the company that puts on PC Forum - kudos to Esther, Daphne, Christina, and the team, and my hat goes off to Shelby and the folks at CNET - smart move! (Full disclosure: Esther Dyson is an investor in Technorati)

Golf, anyone?

I'll be heading out to Scottsdale this afternoon, so drop me a line at dsifry at technorati dot com if you are going to be in Scottsdale and are interested in hooking up for a late dinner tonight or golf Sunday morning. I'm not a great golfer, but I'm not a complete duffer - so anyone who enjoys a nice walk on a big manicured lawn along with some interesting conversation, send an email or leave a message at my room at the hotel.

Scheduled downtime: Upgrading mysql to 4.0.18

Folks,

I'm upgrading mysql to 4.0.18 with statically linked pthreads (the mysql binary) tonight. I've already successfully migrated over backupdb1-4. So, any pages you see for the next hour or so are due to the upgrade procedure. I'll try to make it as painless as possible...

Speaking at the Bay Area Future Salon (Palo Alto)

I'm doing the speaking circuit!

Tomorrow night, I'll be in Palo Alto at the Bay Area Future Salon in Palo Alto, giving a modified version of my ETech Technorati Hacks presentation. There's more information on the Future Salon site, including driving directions to SAP Labs.

Should be a fun time. And those of you who make it just might get a sneak peek at some new stuff we've been working on...

SXSW Update

Due to a family emergency, I've got to cancel out on South by Southwest this year. I'm really bummed, because the folks at the I2 institute have got a great Wireless program going on in conjunction with SXSW, and there's a teriffic set of blog and other social software panels and talks as well. Joi Ito, our new VP of International Business will be there, and you can reach him via email: joi AT technorati.com. He's going to be filling in for me on the Ridiculously Easy Group Forming talk on Monday afternoon as well.

Sputnik puts new AP in Orbit

My good friends over at Sputnik have been very busy. At $185, their new AP 160 (buy it) is probably the least expensive centrally managed hotspot access point in the world. It's got a built-in four-port router so that you can hook up 3rd party wireless access points and manage those, too. And a replaceable antenna, so you can add that higher-gain omni or directional antenna to get long-range wireless coverage.

They also have a new, $195 Plug-In for Pre-Paid Cards that works with Sputnik Control Center so hotspot venues can attract and reward paying customers, and cut off bandwidth hogs.

Sputnik Control Center, the Sputnik AP 120 (buy) and the new AP 160 were built with a simple philosophy in mind: (1) give customers enterprise-class wireless management for commodity-class access points, and (2) keep the technology open and flexible so that customers can test, build, and grow wireless networks in ways that best fit their unique business models.

• Want to offer free wireless? Sputnik is the least expensive way to go, and you get all the management tools and captive portal capabilities to brand your wireless offering.
• Want to charge for wireless access? Sputnik handles all user authentication and tracking, and provides open APIs that let you connect Sputnik Control Center with your preferred billing system.
• Want to offer a mix of open and secure/restricted wireless access at your workplace or school? Sputnik gives you security, control and flexibility.

Sputnik's founding philosophy is paying off: Sputnik boasts nearly 200 paying customers and the list is growing daily.

As Mike Landman, CEO of 3rd Wave, a leading hotspot provider in Atlanta, puts it:

"We looked at a lot of options, but settled on Sputnik because their technology is the most cost-effective and the easiest to deploy--just drop off an access point at the hotspot, plug it into broadband, and you're up and running."

Where else can you build a centrally managed 20-AP hotspot, or unwire a small city, for less than $5,000? Kudos to Sputnik for giving hotspot providers the easiest, most cost-effective, and most flexible tools for building wireless networks. And may a thousand flowers bloom...

Joi joins the Technorati Team

I'm very proud to announce that Joi Ito has joined the Technorati team, where he will be leading our international and mobile efforts. It is a complete pleasure to welcome him on board.