We posted the full powerpoint presentation from that talk. And now we have the 47 minute video of his presentation as well.

The video is below, along with the original powerpoint presentation:

Technorati SOTB 2009 –

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We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below.

Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.

72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.

2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.

Lots more detail in the full presentation, below. You can see the audience reaction on Twitter here.

Technorati SOTB 2009 –

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In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times. Here’s the first. And the second. The last change, made under the direction of incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra, has stayed more or less constant since then.

In the meantime, Technorati has focused on expanding it’s business in other areas, particularly in handling advertising for other sites. Today, only a small percentage of Technorati’s total network traffic of 25 million U.S. unique visitors per month actually visit Technorati.com.

But that doesn’t mean the flagship site isn’t an important asset. And those of us blogging for more than a couple of years can remember the days when Technorati was a key blogging tool, providing, among other things, a high quality real time search engine back when Google only indexed most blogs every few weeks.

Today Technorati still provides a great blog search engine and keeps what many call the definitive Top 100 list of blogs. With the new site, they are focusing more on direct Technorati content (more on that below), and properly categorizing the more popular blogs.

Go check it out yourself, and here’s a rundown of the new features:

Top 100 Blogs:

Top 100 Blogs: Until today, the top 100 blogs were determined based on unique links from other blogs during the previous six months. The top list was fairly static. Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.” The result, says the company, is a lot more volatility in the lists as blogs surge up and down.

Technorati is also categorizing blogs among a variety of topics, and providing separate lists of top blogs for each topic. Here’s Business, for example, and Gadgets.

Publish Directly To Technorati:

Authors can now choose to publish content directly to Technorati to gain exposure to a wider audience. This content is highlighted on the top of the Technorati.com home page. For bloggers with a big audience this won’t be attractive. But if I was just starting out with blogging, I’d post some of my content here to gain exposure, and then cross post to my own blog. Each writer has a profile with links to their site and content they’ve written on Technorati.

Search:

Technorati is changing search to give much more weight towards authority and relevance over recency. For highly queried terms like “iPhone,” this cuts out a lot of noise and helps people find quality/definitive content more quickly. Users can also choose to search for blogs relevant to the query or posts elevant to the query, depending on what they are looking for.

Topical Content:

Technorati still shows outside content on a topical basis, too. The light green navigation bar at the top has topics like “Technology” and “Sports.” Content shown on that channel includes stuff directly written on Technorati as well as posts from blogs with high authority for the topic.

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This is, the company says, an extension of their Series D round from June 2008, where they raised $7.5 million at a roughly $35 million valuation. The company has raise a total of just over $32 million to date (much of that at a much higher valuation).

The company is also in the process of raising additional capital via commercial debt, we’ve heard separately but haven’t confirmed.

This funding should get the company to profitability, says CEO Richard Jalichandra. He won’t say what revenues are, except that it has more than doubled each of the last two years. He also points out that Technorati’s network, with 25 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, is now the 5th largest social media property on the Internet.

In addition to its flagship site, Technorati supplies advertising to 450 or so websites – about half blogs, half niche social networks.

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As we reported earlier today, media search engine Technorati has succumbed to the Twitter infatuation and is launching Twittorati, a site that shows what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about. Our earlier story indicates that the site is launching tomorrow but perhaps our post sped things up. We had a chance to demo the site with Technorati’s CEO Richard Jalichandra. The site pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, which is determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking (its equivalent to Google Page Rank). Authority Ranking is calculated via algorithm of inbound links from other blog posts, and weights those based on timing, relevancy and the inbound link’s site source Authority Ranking.

The blogs that are ranked vary by subject, with The Huffington Post taking the top spot, TechCrunch as no. 2 and Engadget in the no. 3. Twittorati pulls Tweets into a real-time stream (though not fully real-time; like Twitter, you still need to refresh the page to get real-time results) where you can organize Tweets by Authority Ranking or by latest Tweet. Because the Tweets are aggregated from blogs that cover a variety of subject relating to politics, technology, entertainment and more, the subjects of the Tweets are varied and somewhat random. But you can narrow your stream by filtering Tweets by Technorati Tags (life, news, music, politics, etc.) and the top trending Twitter hashtags. For example, some of the top Twitter hashtags that bloggers were Tweeting included #michaelphelps and #MJ. The origins of the Tweets include a blog’s Tweets and bloggers’ personal Tweets from their own accounts. Technorati says it has collected Twitter handles for most of the authors of the top 100 sites.

The site also shows the most popular links that bloggers link to as well as the most popular photos that are linked to. Both link and photo searches can be filtered by most recent links and images. And each day Twittorati pulls in a list of Tweets of featured bloggers that are profiled on the site.

The site itself can be useful when trying to peer into the professional and personal lives of bloggers. I think something that’s missing a breakdown of Tweets from blogs by topic. So for example, if you only wanted to see Tweets from bloggers at technology blogs, there’s no easy way to filter Tweets and blogs by subject. Jalichandra says Twittorati plans to add this functionality in the near future. The site is similar in theory to Federated Media’s ExecTweets, which is focused more on aggregating Tweets from execs in various industries vs. the blogger-focus on Twtterati. WeFollow is also similar, but isn’t limited to just blogs. Missing from the Twittorati are bloggers whose blogs may not make Technorati’s top 100 list, but whose Tweets are relevant and entertaining. Jalichandra says that the site will expand to include other prolific bloggers down the line.

Twittorati is being produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of fellow Twitter aggregatorsMuckrack.com and VentureMaven. Luxury car manufacturer Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati. Technorati Media has been through a roller coaster of highs and lows over the past year. Last June, the company launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network. Prior to launching the ad network, Technorati raised $7.3 million in a fourth round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation. And last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network. And most recently, Technorati launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics and redesigned BlogCritics, a blog network the company acquired.

Unfortunately, Technorati hasn’t been immune to layoffs during the current economic climate. In April, the company let go 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees, and also suffered through an earlier round of layoffs last September and implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. Despite these setbacks, Jalichandra remains optimistic about the future of Technorati and the potential of Twitterati to be a popular destination to peek into the Twittersphere of the blogosphere.

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The site, which we haven’t seen yet, will show what top bloggers are tweeting about, and compare topics to blogosphere trends. The site will also, according to a press release we’ve seen, allow visitors to filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading blogosphere and Twitter trends. It sounds like it may be somewhat similar to Federated Media’s Exec Tweets.

Technorati Top 100 bloggers will be featured at launch, and it will expand to include more authors over time. The site was produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of Muckrack.com and VentureMaven. Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati.

More details when we actually see the site.

Update: Here it is.

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Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.

The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.

Publicly available publishing systems starting in 1999 took the value of time and incorporated it into what was being published (think Pyra which is now Blogger, Moveable Type, Wordpress and Flickr, among the many) as well as search and discovery systems for those published bits like Technorati, Sphere, Rojo, Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub and others, to walk down memory lane . . . (btw, for disclosure purposes I should state that I worked for Technorati in 2004 for 10 months, and consulted or advised most all the others in one form or another).

I started working on this problem in 1999, at UC Berkeley, and eventually did my master’s thesis on live web data search and topic discovery at SIMS (or the iSchool as it’s now known). From 2000 to 2004, people at SIMS would say to me, “What are you doing with blogs and data, it’s just weird. Why does it matter?” But the element of time was the captivating piece that was missing for me from regular search. It’s the element that makes something news, as well as the element that can group items together in a short period to show a focus of attention and activity that often legacy news outlets miss (until more recently when they decided that live web activity was interesting).

At Burning Man in 2005, under a shade structure during a hot, quiet afternoon, I remember having a four or five hour conversation with Barney Pell (who would later found Powerset) about the Live Web and Live Web Search, how to do it, what it meant, how to understand and present time to the user, how much was discovery and how much was search, how structured was the data you could get and how reliant on the time could you be with the data, what meaning you could make from that data, etc. Sergey Brin was sitting and listening, and finally, after a couple of hours, he asked me, “What is the live web and what is live web search?” Since Barney and I had already been doing a deep dive, I assumed Sergey knew what we were talking about, so it surprised me, but I explained why I thought time was a huge missing element of regular search, and that this was the type of search I worked on. Barney and I continued for a couple more hours. And it got cooler so it was time to go admire the art and that was the end of that. But I have wondered over the years where Google is with the live web and when they might do something with time. Twitter seems to be prodding them.

In 2006, “The Living Web” Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy and Brad Stone poked at this issue for the first time in a national forum.

When I look at the latest crop of search startups, I think: Why are we doing it all the same way again? Reinventing the wheel? Is anyone doing anything original either with data or interface? Is anyone building on what we’ve learned before about the backend or UI’s?

Frankly, our filters suck.. and I suppose that if a name change gets us to think anew about better filters, well, I should rejoice. I’m partly to blame for the bad filters we have to date because in having worked on this problem, I’ve contributed to some of the various live web or real time or whatever the word of the moment is to describe trying to solve this problem. We are very good at publishing our thoughts and visions, with time stamps, but not very good at the filtering side of things. The old method of information search and discovery was to open the paper or magazine, turn the pages with editorially filtered and placed information, and when you were finished, you said, “Okay, I’m informed” (whether you really were or not). But the media got complacent, missed stories and with the ease of blog publishing and sites like Flickr for photos, we could replace paper and supplement our information needs with the whole web. The only problem is, it’s the whole freaking web. An avalanche. We feel anxiety on the web from the lack of filter and editorial grace that one or two printed news sources used to give us.

I did a study in 2002, which I repeated in 2004 and again last year in 2008. I asked users to track their online information intake for one week. There were only 30 people in each study, chosen randomly from Craiglist ads, but what I found across each group of 30 was that the average time spent online with news and information sites was 1.25 hours in 2002, 1.85 hours in 2004 and 2.45 hours in 2008. These people are not in Silicon Valley, but they do all have broadband at home and live in the US. Every one of them reported some level anxiety over the amount of data they felt they needed to take in in order to feel informed. They often dealt with it by increasing the time they took to stay informed. They didn’t know that better filters might actually reduce their anxiety.

As Erick noted, the tension to solve this problem is between memory and consciousness; or as Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail called it at Pubsub: retrospective verses prospective search. And it is part of the issue. But there is more.

Discovery does mean you have to introduce time as an element. The user cannot be expected to know what is bubbling up, or the specific phrases that will name the latest thing.

Some people will say “michael jackson” and some will say “MJ” and some will say “king of pop.” And Michael Jackson as a topic is actually pretty easy. I remember once doing usability tests for a live web search and discovery system in 2003, where we asked users to search on Google News and various live web systems for an incident in Australia where a “giant sea creature” was found. But since all the media covering it originated in Australia, and they’d all called it a “massive squid,” and all the follow-on American sources including bloggers had copied the Aussie language, there were no recent hits for “massive sea creature.” Testers had to think creatively about how to get to the info they knew was there, and yet it was a semantic leap. One search tester actually cried as she refused to give up, she was so determined to find the result in any of the live web systems we were testing. We begged her to stop; it was painful. Good discovery could have helped.

Another key element of discovery and live web search is getting structured data, because spidering, which Google uses to get data from the web for it’s regular retrospective web search, makes understanding time with a published work more difficult. It’s hard to work with time if you only know for sure when you spidered the page. Twitter on the other hand has structured data because everything is published in their silo so the sites they provide their complete stream to get it in a structured format. They know the time of each tweet. Not to mention the data is available through API’s. This is the most efficient way to draw out meaning for search because you know for sure about the context of each piece of data, with time as one of the pivots, for search and discovery.

You also need to get the data model right for the backend search data base, in order to get meaning and link metrics. And you need to understand the different corpuses of data to know what things mean to users (not engineers), and figure out the spam and bad actor problems. There is the original context the data had and there is the UI which is so difficult when trying to make time understandable for many users. In fact some think that communicating the time element to regular users is so hard that making time focused search is really an “advanced search” problem.

If designed poorly, the system can contribute to the unnatural production of skewed data by users. If the system involves some sort of filter for authority or popularity, they are subject to power law effects (Technorati calls their metric “authority” but inbound link counts from blogs are not authority, they’re just a measure of popularity). What’s a power law effect? It’s when a system drives activity to reinforce unnaturally the behavior that caused something to be there in the first place. For example, if one of the metrics of a filter counts the number of people clicking on a top search, then the more clicks, the longer the item will stay at the top of the list of searches, even if naturally it would have fallen off the list earlier. Conversely if a metric for a filter involves a spontaneous act, driven by imagination, like writing a tweet, then exposing those items at the top of the filter might be less likely to drive up activity. However, if you show the results to the users, upon seeing a popular topic, they might begin tweeting about that topic without having thought of it before seeing the popular topic. In other words, by revealing the metrics you focus on, you can push users to change their behavior. By driving behavior, power-law distributions keep things with some power at the top because they are at the top or can drive them higher. It becomes a loop. And because no distinction is made between the quality or strength of a unit or what that unit might mean to a group of users in a topic area, straight number counts just aren’t very smart.

For example, if we made a system that counted Om Malik’s inbound links and called it authority, no matter the topic, I think Om would agree that even he wouldn’t have great authority and insight on the subjects of say, modern dance or metal working, if he happened to mention those words in a blog post. But on broadband issues, he is most definitely an authority. But Technorati, OneRiot, and other services that take a metric count and apply it for all topics, all circumstances, all search result matches, without context, randomize the quality of the information the user sees. They may provide a filter across the whole web, but they don’t give us any real help in judging what is useful or not. It’s why topic communities are helpful, and once you find a good editorial filter, driven by the human touch, you glom onto it for dear life because it’s such a time and energy saver.

I’m under no illusions that we’re remotely close to solving Live Web or Real Time search or even recent search. We are not. Nor are we near solving discovery. But I hope we will. Sooner rather than later. Because I need it now. The opportunity is huge. It means really building algorithmically the editorial filters we have today in the form of people, while balancing the mobs’ activities. Solve that and the prize will be big.

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Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web.

Swine Flu is the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, with users rapidly tweeting about the latest news about the disease, including whether it has spread to other states, the Center for Disease Control’s announcement, etc.

Google Trends reports that “Swine Flu Ohio” is the 27th most popular search keyword currently, with searches for the “CDC” and “Swine Flu Symptoms” also making the top 100 keyword searches on Google.

Google Maps have also been created to chart the spread of the Swine Flu. Below is a Google Map created by a bio medical engineer, that charts suspect and confirmed cases of the Swine Flu in the U.S. and Mexico.

Technorati’s index, which graphs the number of times the search term occurs in blog posts across the web, shows that mentions of Swine Flu in blog posts has risen sharply from Friday to nearly 2800 blog post mentions today.

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere

This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords.

swine flu

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Blog search engine Technorati has laid off close to 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees in its PR, engineering and general admin areas. The company’s CEO, Richard Jalichandra confirmed the layoffs. He says they were necessary for the company to continue on the path towards profitability. The reduction will leave the company with 37 employees. Technorati suffered an earlier round of layoffs last September, letting go 6 people and also implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. We’ve added this to the layoff tracker.

Jalichandra maintains that the blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network, Technorati Media. Jalichandra says that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible.

Jalichandra also says that Twitter and Facebook are changing the blogosphere—but in a good way. He says that Twitter and Facebook are just other platforms on which blogs can gain visibility, and Technorati is beginning to track activity on those platforms as well. For instance, here’s a link to Jalichandra’s Twitter page on Technorati. Nevertheless, traffic to Technorati itself over the past several months has flattened at about 5 million unique visitors worldwide, and is declining in the U.S., according to comScore.

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Media search engine Technorati is about to release The Technorati Attention Index, which measures the mainstream media websites with the highest number of blogs linking to them in the past 30 days. Right now it has a blog post with the inaugural list. YouTube takes the top spot with the New York Times, BBC News, CNN.com, and MSN rounding out the top five. Compared to the top non-blog sources on Techmeme’s leaderboard, which is a narrower universe of sites which tech blogs link to, the top five mainstream media sites there are CNET News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Computerworld. (The leaderboard for sister site Memeorandum, which covers politics, more closely matches Technorati’s list).

Here’s the list in its entirety from Technorati’s index:

1. YouTube
2. New York Times
3. BBC News
4. CNN.com
5. MSN
6. guardian.co.uk
7. Washington Post
8. Yahoo! News
9. Reuters
10. Los Angeles Times
11. Telegraph.co.uk
12. MSNBC
13. The Wall Street Journal
14. Time
15. Wired
16. USA Today
17. boston.com
18. FOX News
19. Daily Mail
20. ESPN
21. CBS News
22. Financial Times
23. Forbes
24. San Francisco Chronicle
25. Chicago Tribune
26. The White House
27. New York Post
28. New York Daily News
29. International Herald Tribune
30. PBS
31. Salon.com
32. BusinessWeek
33. Slate
34. Newsweek
35. New York Magazine
36. Economist.com
37. CBC.ca
38. San Francisco Examiner
39. MarketWatch
40. Chicago Sun-Times
41. US News & World Report
42. Houston Chronicle
43. Yahoo! Sports
44. Entertainment Weekly
45. Seattle Times
46. E! Online
47. People
48. Science Daily
49. Style.com
50. The Christian Science Monitor

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Technorati has just launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics. Tag pages range from broad subjects like ‘internet’ to individual companies, with each page offering links to relevant articles, blog posts, user-written summaries, and related topics on Technorati (in some ways the pages are reminiscent of Mahalo’s topical overviews). Unfortunately, while these tags could eventually serve as a handy glossary to the web, it seems that in an effort to quickly build up content Technorati is openly inviting users to submit articles that are less than objective.

Technorati can automatically generate listings of recent blog posts relating to each tag, but it still has to rely on users to write the summaries for each page. To entice writers, the site is allowing users to include links to their own blogs or webpages in their submissions (provided they’re relevant):

“This is a unique opportunity for authors, brands, agencies, experts and content sites with some significant benefits. Your tag article will appear on Technorati.com with a writer credit. You will be seen as the definitive expert on a tag subject – by millions of readers. Your article can include links to useful references and sites, including your own, if relevant, as well as your own byline link. It’s also really easy to contribute: tag articles are only 2-3 paragraphs, between 100 and 200 words, and can live for years as evergreen content.”

To further entice writers, Technorati is making each tag page first come, first served (there’s apparently no voting system in place to float the most objective summaries to the top), so this is effectively a gold rush period. Technorati says that each tag page will be overseen by trusted editors in the Blogcritics community to reject overly commercial submissions, but it still seems like the system is openly inviting self-serving and biased summaries.

For more, check out Technorati’s blog post here.

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Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a new index yesterday that traces blogs and social networking sites. To be honest, it doesn’t say a whole lot that we don’t already know.

The New Media Index’s first report states “From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama’s inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.” The index reported that close to 63 percent of links embedded in social media sites related to the inauguration. Big surprise. The report also said that commentary was very passionate and ran the “ideological gamut.” Also, not earth-shattering news and confirms what everyone already knows-people tend to be more politically feisty on blogs and social media sites.

What is interesting is that main stream media dropped its focus on the inauguration after Tuesday and concentrated on news surrounding President Obama’s policy agenda and cabinet appointees. Does this suggest that inauguration coverage provided by blogs was generally more insightful and attentive than the main stream media’s coverage? Or simply that blogs tend to chew their stories longer than the traditional press? Pew’s index doesn’t really give any indication one way or the other.

PEJ has been searching tirelessly to find a way to monitor the blogosphere, like it does for main stream media. Their solution uses Technorati and IceRocket to track and index more than 100 million blogs and social media sites. PEJ then captures the top daily linked-to stories and analyzes their content. The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week. In another astonishing twist, C-SPAN’s broadcast of the inauguration topped the list.

Judging from the content of this week’s index and other indexes Pew has released, I would not expect a whole lot of surprises from the New Media Index.

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The biggest difference is that Twingly breaks down the most popular blogs by language, which they claim is worth much more for local blogs than competing with others at an international level. I tend to agree with that. It’s rather similar to what Wikio is doing (disclosure: TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon is on Wikio’s board).

To demonstrate the technology, Twingly is debuting its Top 100 today, taking another page from Technorati in that regard. We may be a little biased, but we like Twingly’s Top 100 better because we came out on top across all languages tracked (we also lead the English-language blog ranking). In all seriousness, the top 100 lists from Technorati and Twingly look very alike, although The Huffington Post (which is the most popular blog according to Technorati) isn’t even listed at Twingly’s. The startup says this has to do with the fact that they’re more focused on Europe right now, and that they’ve simply never bothered to ping the service anyway.

You can find out who leads the top 100 per tracked language (12 so far) in Twingly’s blog post announcing the new feature.

Sweden-based Twingly, not to be confused with Twing, doesn’t share much about the underlying technology and only says its ranking system focuses on ‘inlinks and likes among other things’. They also stress that it shows the blogosphere according to their data, and that it’s not necessarily 100% accurate. It’s a nice feature, but late in the game, and you’ve got to ask yourself how obsolete both Twingly’s and Technorati’s ranking would be if Google were actually the next to introduce the next ‘Google PageRank for blogs’.

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This follows Technorati’s August acquisition of BlogCritics, a network of blog content.

AdEngage, which was founded in 2004, sells advertising for 4,000 sites, and has 13 billion ad impressions per month, says Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra. Many of those sites are adult oriented, so Technorati isn’t merging it with its core service. Instead, they’ll launch a separate version of it under the Technorati Media brand in a few weeks. The screen shot below shows what the current, password protected version of the site looks like.

For now the network sells self-service text and pho-text (thumbnail with text) ads on a cost-per-week basis. Soon other advertising types will be added (125×125 display ads to start), as well as CPC and CPM payment options.

The current Technorati Media offering is for larger sites that Technorati partners with. When the AdEngage platform launches smaller blogs can sign up as well, and hopefully command relatively higher advertising rates by grouping with similar blogs in “spheres of influence,” as Jalichandra puts it, based on tagging and linking behavior.

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All week, Technorati is releasing data from its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. On Monday, Technorati told us that bloggers only need 100,000 visitors a month to make $75,000 a year (yeah, right). Today, it offers up something more believable: the more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.

Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.

In fact, about a quarter of all bloggers spend more than 10 hours a week posting, and 66 percent spend more than 3 hours a week.

To summarize some of the findings, from the first two days if the State of the Blogosphere report, iCharts, one of our TC50 finalists, put together the following interactive graphs from the data. Mouse over each part of the graph for more information, and use the sliders to limit the data set. Don’t be shy.

This one shows that collectively, blogs a bigger audience than Facebook and as big an audience as MySpace:

Most bloggers aren’t in it for the money (but you knew that already). Three quarters do it for pure personal satisfaction. Bloggers measure success by how many posts or comments they can generate on their blog (58 percent), how many visitors they get (53 percent), how many links they receive from other blogs (46 percent), or how many RSS subscribers they can amass (39 percent). In other words, they measure success by how much much recognition they get. Only 16 percent measure success by how much money they make.

In terms of demographics, Bloggers are predominantly male across America, Asia, And Europe:

And here are some more detailed demographics of bloggers, based on Technorati’s survey:

Update: Here are the first two charts in iChart form for those who want to play around with the numbers.

And this one’s cool, drag the slider at the bottom to collapse the bars together:

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Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report this week. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.

And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:

Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.

Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.
But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).

Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).

More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.

And blogs continue to be read: blogs in the aggregate now attract 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to Comscore, nearly double the number of people who visit Facebook.

This is just the first day of the report, so get ready for a lot of data over the next four days. A complete index of the State of the Blogosphere going back to 2004 is here.

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Today they are announcing the acquisition of Blogcritics, a six year old blog network that we first wrote about in 2005. The price, which was all cash, is not being disclosed but our guess is that it is in the $1 million range.

Blogcritics is similar to Salon’s newly launched Open Salon, which lets lots of people write articles from time to time on topics they’re familiar with. The site has had published submissions from 2,300 authors, many of which maintain their own blogs as well. 73,000 articles have been published in the six years since launching. The site draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors who generate 3-4 million page views.

Authors maintain the copyright on their content and grant a perpetual license to Blogcritics.

Technorati will incorporate Blogcritics into its Technorati Media property, which is run by VP Publishing David White. The site already runs some Technorati ads. Over time most or all ad units will be through the Technorati ad network. Eric Olsen, the founder of Blogcritics, and Philip Win, the lead developer, will become Technorati employees.

Jalichandra says that they will likely acquire more content sites in the near future. He also made it clear that there will be a wall between the Media and Search properties, and that no favoritism will be shown to Blogcritics content.

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As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing.

The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.

Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.

Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs.

Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content.

Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently.

For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months.

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I spoke with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra this evening, who confirms that a venture round has been closed and says that the company will make an announcement next week that includes more information.

It’s also clear that the company is refocusing its business. We believe they are launching a blogger-focused advertising network based on documents we published in February. The company has, however, considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. We’ll know more next week.

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Think Lonely Planet travel guides, except they are created on the fly from Internet data sources, customized to you personally and then delivered via PDF instantly or (a color printed version) by mail within 4 business days. Data comes from open sources like wikipedia, wikitravel, Flickr and Google Maps, as well as proprietary sources that have cut deals with the company. And you can create a guide for virtually anywhere in the world – they have 30,000 or so destinations today, and will be adding regional versions in the futures (”France” or “Napa Valley” for example).

Users can add or remove sections that appeal to them (museums, for example, or walking tours), and the guides include things like up to date weather forecasts, events that are going on during your visit, current exchange rates, etc. If you tell it where you are staying, the guide will include walking maps based on that location. An example guide that I created is embedded below.

The guides aren’t free – a printed version costs $25, PDF (which can be printed at home or downloaded to a laptop or Kindle) is $10. Unsatisfied customers can get a full refund, the site says, and keep the guide.

Offbeat Guides raised a small seed round of financing (a “few hundred thousand dollars” says Sifry) in February 2008. The first 250 people to use the code “TechCrunch” can get into the beta immediately, along with coupons for two free books.

Also below is an interview with Sifry about Offbeat Guides from last week (Thanks to Michael Pick for the video branding work). And see our coverage of Nile Guide, which is also allowing users to create personalized travel itineraries.

Paris Travel Guide By Offbeat Guides – Find Documents

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Blog search engine Technorati was days away from merging with blog network b5media when the whole deal blew up earlier this week, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

Technorati has been searching for a new strategy ever since it appointed CEO Richard Jalichandra last October. It was recently trying to raise an additional round of financing, and pitching venture capitalists that it could turn itself into a blog advertising network and/or even pursue a blog roll-up strategy.

The talks with Toronto-based b5media (they’re big in Canada) indicate that it is taking the blog roll-up idea more seriously than we previously thought. If the merger with b5media had gone through, Technorati would have gained a network of 340 blogs. One of the slides in the pitch deck Technorati was showing potential investors (shown above) outlines how a roll-up strategy could be combined with an ad network. Technorati would use its search engine to promote owned-and-operated blogs. It would sell ads using its own sales force instead of third-party ad networks for an “immediate 30-50% revenue bump” and sell across its network.

According to our source, the deal with b5media never went through, though, because of personality conflicts between the CEOs and a lack of transparency on Technorati’s part during due diligence. At least that is how the b5media side sees it. Prior to its dalliance with Technorati, b5media was itself trying to raise another venture round that would put a $20 million valuation on the company. But there were no takers. So b5media started talking to potential merger partners or acquirers (including at one point Federated Media Publishing). A combination with Technorati could have made both Technorati and b5media more appealing to later-stage venture investors. But now the two need to keep looking for other options before their time (and cash) runs out.

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The Blogger & Podcaster Network (BPN) will target “the B,C,D & E listers who have smaller and often more niche audiences.” Blogger & Podcaster have retained investment bank The Riderwood Group to obtain expansion funding for the network.

Those signing up to BPN will get promotion in the mainstream media through The Blogger & Podcaster Guide and revenue from advertising and other revenue generating services.

The obvious comparison for the network is Technorati’s recently revealed advertising network. Although both target the long tail, BPN would be one of the most different pitches I’ve ever seen in 6 years covering this space. To be a part of BPN you have to be listed in The Blogger & Podcaster Guide which costs $5 a month due to a new deal with USA Today (it was previously $49.95/ month). On top of the advertising opportunities there is also an affiliate program for selling memberships to the guide, pretty standard fare. This is where it gets very interesting: members will have “access to healthcare.” Exactly what level of healthcare provided wasn’t specified, with Blogger & Podcaster simply saying that “this is a big issue for bloggers/podcasters looking to leave their day jobs and go full-time.” Ultimately the devil will be in the detail but immediately every US based blogger who blogs for a living is going to want to look at whatever they are offering; even if it’s a basic healthcare package it’s a whole lot better than having no healthcare coverage in country that (unlike most of the rest of the western world) does not provide universal healthcare.

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From what we hear, Federated Media is looking at both financing and new buyout offers, but wants a valuation way beyond the $100 million floated to them last year. Founder John Battelle is said to be looking for more of a Glam-like valuation, in the $400+ million range. Glam has a similar business model to Federated Media, but focuses on womens sites. Glam also guarantees significant revenue to its partners, which resulted in a loss last year of $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue. Federated Media doesn’t guarantee revenue, and is reportedly profitable (they better be, with how much of our revenue they keep).

Federated Media is reportedly generating gross revenues in excess of $2 million per month, and they keep 40% of that after the split to partners.

It’s unlikely the company will get buyout offers in the price range Battelle is looking for, so a new financing is likely. But part of me wonders why they’re doing this at all. A new financing means a bigger valuation, which means they need a much higher price down the road when they do eventually sell. And with competitors springing up all over the place, margins can take a hit.

Perhaps Federated Media intends to take the Glam approach and go in the red for the sake of growth and begin to guarantee revenues. That’s a slippery slope, but it may also get Battelle his payday.

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First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising – their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.

What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience.

That change foreshadows the upcoming shift – which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.

Advertising networks are popular right now – Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.

Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively.

Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product.

Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, but lost high profile partner Digg last year to Microsoft. Others, including us, have simply sold advertising directly while continuing to work with FM. With Technorati entering the market, publishers will have yet more choices. That’s good for everyone except the ad networks competing for their business.

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For the one person reading this who doesn’t know how Hot or Not style sites work, the site presents a website which must be scored between 1 or 10, 1 being not, 10 being hot.

MG Seigler writes that “Quite frankly I’m shocked it has taken this long for someone to come out with this.” I like MG, so perhaps its the intense jetlag talking when I write what the? Sure, on the surface it’s an obvious idea, but the reason why its taken this long for a site like this to appear is because the idea isn’t a very good one.

David Sifry hints that it might be a lark, and if that is the case then we’ll let it slide and recommend people take a look, it should provide seconds, maybe even a minute or two of interest. If, as Sifry suggests “Who knows where it’ll go” (meaning it might take off), I’m off to buy alcohol. Cheers.

Update: you can vote for Web Hot or Not on Web Hot or Not here.

Update 2: another site in this space that does it in a better way is CommandShift3. It’s a not a direct Hot or Not clone but it allows you to rate sites. Hot or Not Designs is another one.

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