Technorati Blog

No doubt about it: my first week on the job was a whirlwind of education and discovery. As our VP of marketing, Derek Gordon, said to me: “Welcome to the Blogosphere!”

I promised that I would spend my first weeks on the job really listening and over my first seven days as CEO of Technorati I’ve already heard much that is instructive and useful. First and foremost, I want to say thank you for your feedback and for thinking deeply about how it is Technorati can be a success. I also want to say that I’ve heard from the blogosphere loudly and clearly about the decline of our service quality.

For instance, it’s clear that removing filtering tools and making tag search results inseparable from keyword search results was a mistake. We're going to correct that as soon as possible. We know now that filtering results by the source blog's authority is a powerful tool that visitors to the site depended on. We also know now that we alienated bloggers who tagged their blog posts, say, as being about Facebook (a really nice little company, I might add) by burying them with all blog posts that mention Facebook.

Also, stability and uptime has been a problem: there’s no sugarcoating this. As many of you know, we’ve been engaged in a process of moving our co-location facility out of 365 Main here in San Francisco to a new facility. Doing a move of this kind while keeping the site live was daunting (and I can’t thank our ops teams enough for the late nights and lost weekends throughout – by all accounts, they were heroic) and, unfortunately, resulted in inconsistent service delivery. But I’m happy to report the move is done, no lives were lost, and we’re already seeing dramatic service improvements as a result.

And, I’ve learned from our teams that we have more work underway to bring forth other great aspects from our treasure trove of data; to enhance crawler accuracy; to reduce indexing latency; and to bolster system stability.

Lastly, I’ve learned that while the core of everything we do is in blog search – without question, we must do that very, very well – Technorati also needs to provide more than basic search results in order to be a successful business. We also need to be a place where people can not only search, but are surprised and delighted by a discovery process that highlights the best of blogs and the media those bloggers are talking about, and deliver it all in near real-time.

This is a very tall order. But Technorati has a team of incredibly committed and extraordinarily talented people working hard every day to make this vision a reality. And we’re listening – every day – to the feedback you give us. So keep it coming.

With office key card in hand, network ID and password assigned, and a new Post-it pad on my desk,it’s truly official: today is my first day on the job as Technorati’s new President & CEO.

While starting any new job always has its immediate challenges, my hope is to spend much of the coming days and weeks doing a lot of listening: to the awesome team here at Technorati; to our esteemed advisors; to a broad range of the bloggers we highllight (starting with our amazing Top 100); to our mainstream media partners; and to our new partners working with us on our Conversational Marketing initiative.

My belief is that through actively engaging with all those we seek to serve better and by really listening to their guidance, we can continue to build a service and an experience that is second to none. There is much to build on here at Technorati and I know that by working closely with all those folks who are invested in our success, we can continue to innovate, grow and thrive as a vital part of the social media ecosystem.

I hope to meet many of you and I’ll be paying attention to your blog posts, your comments, your links, your searches, your tags and your favorites in the hopes that I can always learn from you. To Dave, the board of directors and the team, I’d just like to say thanks for giving me such a great opportunity. I’m absolutely thrilled to be here!

I admit it: I’m in no way impartial where Technorati is concerned. In my view, Technorati is a great company poised to achieve even greater heights.

So it gives me great pleasure to tell you that how we get to that next great place is now the job Technorati’s newest team member:

Richard Jalichandra, who begins work today as Technorati President & Chief Executive Officer.

This is a very exciting moment for Technorati. As you all know, we’ve been looking for someone to take the CEO mantle since my decision last spring to transition to a role on the board of directors. As Technorati moves from its start-up phase into its revenue stage, we wanted to find a seasoned leader experienced in scaling operations like ours. As the Board and I searched, we had one goal in mind: finding a highly qualified individual who would also be a great match to our culture and mission. So, as both Technorati's founder and now its Chairman of the Board, I feel confident saying that we've now found and signed that person.

I know that Richard is really excited to be at the helm of this company – almost as excited as we are to have him. He is our top choice.

Richard is one of those rare individuals with leadership experience across the media universe: as a client; running several agencies; at several large publishers; and at an advertising network. Prior to joining Technorati, he held significant leadership roles at Exponential / Tribal Fusion, Fox Interactive Media and IGN. Most recently, Richard worked on a variety of Internet media projects as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Battery Ventures, an advisory board member at MyYearbook.com and Pixsy, and as an M&A and strategy consultant for several other Internet media properties.

So, from now on, you’ll be hearing more from Richard than from me where Technorati is concerned. On a personal note, I want to thank our CFO Teresa Malo, our VP of Engineering Dorion Carroll, our VP of Marketing Derek Gordon, and, my fellow board members, especially Peter Hirshberg who has been leading our Conversational Marketing effort, for their stewardship throughout this transition. I expect great things from this extraordinary team moving forward.

Stay tuned!

As readers of this blog may recall, the July power outage at our 365 Main Street facility knocked Technorati's web site off the 'net. Long prior to that event, we were already making plans to vacate 365 Main and move the infrastructure hosted there to another facility; that incident hardened our resolve to do so with all available haste. Since then, we've been busily migrating functionality to another data center. Most of the time, these migrations have been transparent but there have been a few episode where things didn't go quite as planned. In those cases, when crawl latencies are high or the Technorati Monster has been displayed instead of our web site, we've been working diligently to make the necessary corrections. This morning, a particularly egregious instance of this occurred. Operations appear to be fully restored now and we appreciate you bearing with us while these transitions are underway.

Beginning at midnight on the morning of Friday, September 21 (PDT), some delicate network functionality will be migrated out of 365 Main. While we expect any disruption to service availability to be at most a few minutes, we've identified a 4 hour window ending at 4:00 a.m. (PDT) within which these changes will be completed. We wanted to let everyone know that this was going to occur and hope to minimize any inconvenience this may present. By the week's end, we expect to have no more infrastructure operating out of 365 Main. The attention that this move has required will be rededicated to the other areas where it is needed to continue to scale and improve Technorati's service.

There were a lot of developments over the past week in the emerging field of conversational marketing, something we first wrote about last January and have been working on with bloggers, brands and agencies ever since.

Here's a quick summary of what we've been up to, with details below:

-Auto manufacturer Scion launched a new conversational marketing campaign with Technorati aggregating conversation about independent film festivals and films, and creating awareness for indie film bloggers.

-At the Conversational Marketing Summit, Technorati and Ogilvy released a white paper, The Manifesto on Monday Morning summarizing our thinking and approaches to conversational marketing. The paper includes several case studies, a proposed conversational marketing code of conduct, and Technorati's technical and product approach to building conversational campaigns. The paper opens with a section by Doc Searls with rules for the road for marketers to consider.

-Together with The Conversation Group, we launched a conversational media microsite at www.conversationalmedia.org that constantly aggregates posts about conversational media and marketing.

And here are the details:

Scion

The most recent example of a conversational marketing project is a new section of Technorati we developed with auto manufacturer Scion, which highlights blogosphere conversations about independent films and film festivals. If you've ever been in the indie film community, you know how much work it is to get people to pay attention, get word of mouth out and generally be heard against the background noise of Big Entertainment. The Scion brand has built a reputation in supporting alternative and "off the beaten path culture." (Their words. From their site. Which puts culture on the same level as cars and their owners.)

As their first foray into conversational marketing, Scion is concentrating in one place the voices of indie film culture as heard in the blogopshere. There is a lot of conversation out there about indie film, but its tough to find. You can search film and festival titles, or click through a blogroll of film blogs, but the Indie Film Festival Guide, at cafe.technorati.com/film shows links and excepts of these posts in one place, sending new traffic off these bloggers. And to really celebrate this community and its passions, Scion is placing conversational ads at Technorati and elsewhere. These ads feature constantly updating syndicated headlines from the indie film site and further create awareness for film festivals and film bloggers.

We believe that conversational marketing starts with conversation and not marketing--- and properly executed this medium allows for a relationship to emerge between brands and communities they are passionate about. Scion's commitment to alternative culture is a great long term example of such a relationship, and the new film project we're working on with them is something that can benefit the indie film community and its many followers.

White Paper and Code of Conduct

A year ago when we did our very first conversational syndication project (with Paramount, on Al Gore's film an Inconvenient Truth) Dave Sifry and I realized that there were a set of ethical issues we needed to think through in conversational marketing and advertising. How transparent should a brand's editorial selection process be? How do we avoid polluting this form of commercial culture with astroturfing, corporate sponsored fake blogs, or undisclosed pay-per-post. This week we are publishing a proposed conversational marketing code of ethics--- for which we invite comment and debate. We're using these guidelines with brands and agencies as way to explain that when you engage in conversation you need to do so in an open, transparent manner. These guidelines are included on our whitepaper, and here:

A proposed Conversational Advertising Code of Conduct

• Transparency in the use of a publisher’s content

Fair use rules offer the legal and ethical underpinnings for including excerpts of a blog post or article in another site. By pointing to a post, an advertiser ultimately increases exposure and awareness of the original content. Nevertheless, we believe any blogger has the right to refuse permission for an excerpt or link to his post to appear in a conversational advertising site. A blogger’s content should never be syndicated in its entirety: headlines, snippets and/or truncated posts are acceptable, but the actual full-length post should only be available on the blogger’s blog or at the blogger’s discretion. The link back to the bloggers site must be maintained in the conversational ad so as to drive traffic to the blogger. There should be a means by which that blogger can opt out if his/her content has been referenced by an advertiser sponsored site.

• Transparency in the editorial process
Advertisers should disclose the filter and editorial mechanisms they use to find and/or display content.
If inclined, the audience should be able to understand the degree to which the content they see has been editorially selected: heavily (sponsored and/or handpicked posts), moderately (preset filters and restrictions) or not-at-all (unfiltered streams of content). Furthermore, as a gesture of transparency, advertisers may want to offer a means to view completely unfiltered content (e.g., links to live search results).

• Transparency in attributing ads
If a brand sponsors a conversational ad, the ad should say so. If a brand syndicates conversation onto a site they maintain or pay for, this sponsorship should be disclosed. Syndicating content on topics relevant to a brand and its customers can be an excellent way to facilitate conversation and help foster a community, but a brand’s presence in that conversation must be accurately represented.

• Transparency in influencing content creators
Conversational advertising will fail if it is exploited as a means to cover-up sponsored blogging, pay-per-posting, or any other publishing that is supported and influenced by a brand without being represented as such. Previous instances of undisclosed brand-blog collusion have led to online backlashes for the brands and hurt the reputation of the blogosphere. If an advertiser enlists the assistance of bloggers, compensates them, or starts blogs itself, that advertiser should make its influence over the content apparent, and neither hide that relationship nor advertise those content creators as impartial parties. As long as transparency is maintained, the content created when advertisers work with publishers is perfectly legitimate social media.

Of course guidelines like these ultimately are sourced in the brilliant principals of books like the Cluetrain Manifesto, which as its first thesis declared eight years ago, "Markets are Conversations." What was theory back then is now something talked about daily by brands, pr people and ad agencies. This week Technorati and Ogilvy are sharing our thinking the best practices and approaches to conversational marketing in a white paper entitled, The Manifesto on Monday Morning How to put the theories of Cluetrain to work for you. In writing this, we back to the source and asked Cluetrain coauthor Doc Searls to weigh in with his thoughts on what's changed in eight years and how marketers should approach conversation today. Here's some of Doc's thinking excerpted from the white paper:

• The framing for conversational marketing should be conversation, not marketing. Think about what you want in a conversation, and let that lead your marketing.
• The purpose of conversation is to create and improve understanding, not for one party to "deliver messages" to the other. That would be rude.
• There is no "audience" in a conversation. If we must label others in conversation, let's call them partners.
• People in productive conversation don't repeat what they're saying over and over. They learn from each other and move topics forward.
• Conversations are about talking, not announcing. They're about listening, not surveying. They're about paying attention, not getting attention. They're about talking, not announcing. "Driving" is for cars and cattle, not conversation.
• Conversation is live. It’s constantly moving and changing, flowing where the interests and ideas of the participants take it. Even when conversations take the form of email, what makes them live is current interest on both sides.

What this means for conversational marketing is that brands must be living things too. Not just emblems. Those that succeed will be as live—as open to the flow and diversion of ideas—as the market conversations they participate in.

( I should point out that Cluetrain had four co-authors and these thought's are Doc's and not those of the entire team.)

Dan Farber at ZDNet wrote a great summary our thinkng here.

Marketingshift also covered us, picking up here a major theme from the white paper: that the conversational center of the blogosphere is what we call "the magic middle" ; blogs with 20-1000 inbound links.

The Conversation Group launches to facilitate market conversations.

As Technorati has been working with brands and agencies over the past few months, we've had a lot of requests to help companies think through the best way to engage with bloggers, provide advice on what their conversational strategy should be, and how best to design a campaign. As a technology company we kept having to say, "No, we're not a creative agency, so we can't do this work for you." Which was frustrating because most of brands we talked to genuinely want to know how to get conversation right and engage in an authentic manner. The result of all this thinking was the creation of a new company last week by a former member of the Technorati family, Ted Shelton. The Conversation Group has launched as a professional services firm to help brands build conversational strategies and marketing initiatives. . They are a Technorati partner and have been working with Scion, Microsoft and several other brands on developing client campaigns using Technorati's conversational marketing system as well as technologies from other vendors. In the midst of a very busy launch, The Conversation Group built a terrific microsite using Technorati's conversational marketing system to aggregate conversation from across the blogosphere about conversational marketing. Its a great way to keep track of what everyone is saying about this emerging field.

Technorati collects millions of blog posts every day — too many for the average human being to even try to track. As a Technorati power user, I've been fascinated by just how much I can find out using Technorati Search. If you're like me and you know how to construct just the right search, you can winnow the results to just what you are looking for.

That being said, I've read a lot of great feedback on Technorati, how we should organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers be found. In particular, I read a lot of blog posts asking us to build what bloggers want. Well, today we are releasing a major overhaul of the Technorati Home page and a completely new area of the site that emphasizes blogs, Technorati Topics. With Topics, we help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.

Each topic features blog posts from many of the best blogs out there to help you discover what's going on. The posts are refreshed frequently to reflect breaking news, new opinions, and the latest from the Web. We've set out to help you find some great blog posts to read and we've organized them by easy to browse topics. We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

I am very proud of what the team has put together over the summer. We continue to work on search, stability, and performance and we're listening to what you have to say about Technorati. I want you to know we really appreciate all that every blogger has to say. Today's release is just a first step. There is a lot more we have up our sleeves, so stay tuned for what's coming next and come back often.

I welcome your feedback and input, so, please, join the discussion about Technorati.

We at Technorati are continually looking for ways to improve our service. We've heard many of your comments, concerns, and suggestions, and now we've revamped our Support Section. We hope these new improvements and features make it easier for everyone to find the information they need, and help each other out in the process.

One new feature is the combined search box that helps users discover answers in both our monitored Discussions and updated FAQs. It's a fast and highly effective way to locate exactly what you're looking for.

We've also added a Troubleshooting area, and a Site Status blog that will keep you up-to-date with the latest site developments (and issues, should there be any). We hope that with these additional resources, users will be able to find answers and explanations quickly and easily, as well as have a dedicated place to get informed, share tips and tricks, and interact with other members who also have something to say.

Come check it out!

We are performing maintenance on our spiders for the next few hours. New posts will not be available during this time.

We expect to return to normal operations by 9PM PDT.

At the conclusion of the maintenance, we will resume spidering and will pick up from where we left off. No data will be lost as a result of this maintenance.

Thank you.

Update: as of 10:15PM PDT we are spidering all new and old pings. Thanks for your patience.

If there's one thing I've learned during my time as CEO here at Technorati is that making tough choices is a daily reality. But some choices are tougher than others, particularly when they involve one's own self.

You see, I've made the tough decision to turn the reigns of the company over to other managers at the company. For those of you who follow Technorati regularly, you know that we've been conducting a CEO search since Spring and that it was just a matter of time before I made a transition. But searches such as these take time, especially in a market as frothy as this one, and I decided that rather than waiting for the process to play out, I would go ahead and transition to the board exclusively, taking on the role of Chairman of the Board.

As of today, Teresa Malo, CFO, Dorion Carroll our Vice President of Engineering and Derek Gordon, our Vice President of Marketing, will operate as a committee of the Office of the President, jointly focused on the day-to-day management of Technorati and achieving some important, very strategic milestones. This committee will report directly to our Board of Directors. And, of course, Peter Hirshberg will continue as our "rainmaker-in-chief", leading the continuing development of our Conversational Marketing initiative, corporate development and public relations.

Be clear: the board is still conducting a search for the next great leader of this great company. And I'll still be engaged strategically from the point of view of a director on the board. But I strongly believe this is the right team at the right moment to focus the company's efforts and get us to our objectives.

I've been doing startups for almost all of my adult life. And I LOVE startups. I love the teams. I love the sense of mission, and the fast innovation. I love building something from an idea - a whiff of air over vocal cords - into a real, concrete business with real customers and a deep and real sense of corporate mission. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten the opportunity to do that with so many diverse teams and businesses - SecuRemote, Linuxcare, Sputnik, and Technorati. One of the joys is also being a part of becoming a "revenue-stage" company - a company with lots of real customers, where the demands on teams shift away from fundamental blue-sky innovation and focus much more into building great things for customers, reducing expenses, and making the business into much more of a revenue machine. It always strikes me with a bit of sadness as well.

Technorati is now a revenue stage business - we've been hiring up sales folks, as well as building much more detailed roadmaps and product pipelines. Customer-driven needs, pipeline management, operational management, and expense control are now a much bigger part of our life as a company than it was when we were running on a couple of servers in my basement.

Which brings me to my next big piece of news: today we also say goodbye to eight of our team members. Because we'll be focusing our efforts more precisely moving forward, it became clear we needed to adjust our expense structure to be more appropriately aligned with our priorities moving forward. So, we had to make the difficult decision to part ways with eight of our staff members. Undertaking this action was gut wrenching - all our team members are greatly valued - but was necessary to ensure the ongoing success and growth of Technorati.

To all who move on to great new things, let me just say: thank you. I value each of your unique contributions and I'll miss working with you.

I'm continually impressed by the strength and depth of our leadership team, and their ability to buttress my operational weaknesses with their verve, passion, and determination. I'm a lucky guy. While I'm turning over the reigns of the company I founded and love so much, I'm not going away. Promise. You can continue to keep track of me via my blog at Sifry's Alerts. Check in often: there's lots more to come!

And, sadly, you probably aren't either. At least according to the Technorati blog ranking system. But it was fun while lasted, right?

Technorati experienced a data flow breakdown on Saturday, August 4th that caused our ranking system to, well, sort of blow a gasket. My colleagues have identified the problem, we have corrected it and we've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

The good news is: the system is working normally again. The bad news: unless you are in fact #1 according to our ranking systems, you're no longer #1. But have faith: you can get there!

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for the MANY entertaining blog posts pointing out the error.