Techcrunch, Alarm clock and even Jason Calacanis weighed in on David Sifry’s departure. Jason extrapolated into some things that I don’t agree with completely, except with his suggestion that Web 2.0 companies try to make a profit, but I’ll leave that alone for now.
David Sifry today announced that he has stepped down as CEO of Technorati. While the search for a new CEO continues, Teresa Malo (CFO), Dorion Carroll (VP-Engineering), and Derek Gordon (VP-Marketing), will manage the day-to-day operations of the company. Sifry will become “Chairman of Technorati’s board”. What does it ultimately prove? It again clearly demonstrates that Internet experience is not the primary indicator of Internet executive future success.
Hello people. Technorati did a redesign that refocused on mainstream media as I noted in my earlier post the death of blog search. Then Technorati used tags to grow traffic from other search properties. As Arrington asked in early June “When will the Technorati traffic party end?” Apparently Google and others took notice of this and the party ended in July based on Alexa data – I’m surprised Michael did not discuss this at length today in his post actually. This dip exposed the payday to payday advertising dollar budgeting leading to the departure of Sifry and 8 others. It should be noted that this followed the dismissal of several other employees during the July 4th holiday.
Looking at a May 9th Mashable post, it seems that around $1 million was raised when it expanded a round of funding from 10.52 Million to 11.52 Million. It appears that Technorati was spending more cash than it was taking in, even before the traffic decline in July, based on the early July layoffs. The traffic decline in July only made that situation worse.
This leaves Technorati in the unenviable position of needing to generate new advertising dollars at a time when the engineering needs an overhaul it can’t afford. Repairs such as Typepad blog overcounting, flawed link metrics and many other flaws can not occur at this time.
In fact, someone suggested to me in a phone conversation today that perhaps they should shut Technorati off completely now and just sell it’s likely most valuable asset – a 301 redirect of the Technorati domain. The talk of taking Technorati public via IPO will likely be nothing more than that talk in David Sifry’s previous blog posts.(URL REMOVED)
So where is a blog searcher to go now?
Ask – They have recently revamped their offering dramatically and comment search is now combined with post search. It is an offering that is available directly on their front page.
Google – They should move blog search to the front page as I suggested previously and ideally should build and option to show it mixed with news sites.
Other players like Topix, if they were to index the blogosphere fully, could also emerge as an alternative that would properly mix news and blogs together demonstrating that most news is being lifted from blogs by the mainstream media.
[…] appropriate, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt to some extent. Update: David Dalka thinks Technorati’s Google SEO tactics may have accelerated Sifry’s […]
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Dave…Google search seriously stinks for finding out who’s linking to your blog. for me, blogging’s not just about what I write, and a level of authority I gain, but also measuring who’s helping contribute to my rise in authority–and a lot of that has to do with who’s linking to me. I like to get to know other bloggers who link to me regularly–Google doesn’t help with that. Ask doesn’t help with that (although some of their new stuff is really great.) And Icerocket doesn’t go deep enough into the blogosphere. As it stands now, Google only rewards heavily linked bloggers or bloggers who don’t upset it in some way (like those of us who didn’t convert our templates in the Google/Blogger merger)
Technoratt–even with its occasional outages–still stands out in blog search for who’s linking to whom. This is not just important to enterprising bloggers, but to business bloggers who may be monitoring what other bloggers are saying about their work. Think about it.
I would highly encourage that everyone use a blogging platform that allows trackbacks and that everyone use trackbacks properly as a good conversational blogger should.
Your blog should tell you who is linking to you via trackbacks itself from bloggers who properly utilize trackbacks. Outsourcing this to a search engine is unnecessary but it shows where people could add the features you suggest in other search engines.
David…even the best trackback features aren’t particularly accurate–and every blogger, no matter what the platform, should be able to have his/her links counted. We shouldn’t necessarily all be herded into one particular blogging platform. That’s not all that practical either.
We have a differenc of opinion on this, and it’s not a bad thing. Isn’t that kind of what conversation’s sometimes about? or do you see blogs mostly for pontification?
I can understand the desire to know who is linking to a specific post – totally!!!
But why does a count matter to you?
[…] David Dalka looks at a potentially post-Technorati landscape and runs down other blog search engines, such as Ask, Google, and Icerocket. My personal take is that there is yet to be the “Google” of the blog search market (and that includes Google blog search!). Technorati is actually just about the best at present, and I like the introduction of its “authority” system, though how it works is somewhat mysterious to me. […]
[…] last year it was entirely useful. I found Twittter + Google Blog Search to be more useful. [From Death of Blog Search Part 2 – Sifry Leaves Technorati ] You can leave a response, or trackback from your own […]
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[…] leider ging unser Traffic zurück. Und mit dem Traffic ging der […]
Network Marketing Opportunities…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
[…] things have seriously changed at Technorati this year – Richard Jalichandra is the new Technorati CEO and the […]
[…] things have seriously changed at Technorati this year – Richard Jalichandra is the new Technorati CEO and the […]
[…] seen me talk about this before. Now the new CEO not only hasn’t fixed the Typepad duplicate counting problems, there are […]
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Well, there are many alternative blog search systems and more generally Web 2.0 search engines emerging here or there.
I would mention the http://www.blogdimension.com initiative which combines blog search, image search, podcast search, online video search and soon people search and shopping 2.0 search.
So, things are evolving at a fast pace in this market.
Best,
[…] That’s right, they shouldn’t spend a minute on it, they should be fixing the death of blog search. Six Apart should immediately fix this mess and show you respect user’s time by […]
I agreee with Hendrick who mentioned other alternative web 2.0 search engines. Blog Dimension is a nice site and should do well. The blog landscape seems to change almost daily on what is hot and what is not.