Technorati Blog

On October 1st, we’re teaming up to support DonorsChoose.org in their 2nd Annual Blogger Challenge DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to getting our kids the materials, resources and experiences they need to learn. They’re challenging the blogosphere to compete to see who can rally the most support for public schools. Across the blogosphere, bloggers are creating giving pages that list specific classroom requests in public schools--and then encouraging their readers to donate to those classroom requests.

Technorati is sponsoring the "generosity rankings" – which also means that at the end of the challenge we’ll be broadcasting the results showing which bloggers drove the most generosity. You can see the current giving contest here.

During the last DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge, blog readers donated $420,000 toward classroom projects benefitting 75,000 students in low-income communities. This year, the need is even more urgent: the rough road ahead for the US economy means an even rougher road for public schools. With your participation, you and your readers can help thousands of public school kids. It’s easy:

HOW YOUR BLOG CAN HELP

1. Pick a few classroom requests posted on DonorsChoose.org and add them to a challenge page which takes 1-2 minutes to set up.

2. Do a post on October 1 encouraging your readers to donate to any of the classroom requests on each of your challenge page. Your readers can give as little as $5.

3. Publish a widget which pulls in the classroom requests you have selected and shouts out the readers who have donated to those requests. Simply select the category to which your blog belongs to grab the appropriate widget.

If you have additional questions or need help getting started, feel free to contact DonorsChoose.org directly at bloggers@DonorsChoose.org.

BACKGROUND ON THE CHARITY
DonorsChoose.org grew out of a high school in the Bronx where teachers saw their students going without the materials needed to learn. Our website provides an easy way for everyday people to address this problem. Public school teachers post project requests that range from a $100 classroom library, to a $600 digital projector, to a $1,000 trip to the zoo. People like you can choose which projects to fund and then get photos and thank-you letters from the classroom.

BACKGROUND ON THE 2008 DONORSCHOOSE.ORG BLOGGER CHALLENGE
In October of 2007, bloggers competed to see who could rally the most support for public schools via DonorsChoose.org. Blog readers gave $420,000 to classroom projects benefitting 75,000 students in low-income communities. While A-list bloggers like Engadget and TechCrunch inspired great generosity, smaller blogs with really engaged readers generated even more! In fact, it was a personal blog from Brooklyn, TomatoNation who brought in a whopping $100,000.

Thank you so much for your support.

I’m very happy to announce that we released the 2008 State of the Blogosphere report this morning. If you missed my talk at Blog World Expo on Saturday, you can see the study here.

We’ve been publishing this report since Dave Sifry wrote the first one in 2004.
This year, we wanted to go beyond the numbers and deliver deeper insights into bloggers and the state of blogging today. In addition to analyzing the data from the Technorati Index, for the first time, we’ve reached out to the blogosphere to understand the role of blogging in their lives; tools, time and resources used for their blogs; and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally and financially.

So what did Technorati measure this year and why?

There’s a wide range of estimates of the number of global blogs as well as blog readership (including ours), but all the numbers agree that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. Further, as the blogosphere grows in size and influence, the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream site become less clear. Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the blogosphere.

We feel that the real story now lies with the Active Blogosphere. The trends, stories and behaviors here influence not only the rest of the blogosphere but mainstream media as well.

Technorati defines the Active Blogosphere as: The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

So how do we determine who’s active? Some blogs are more integral to the blogosphere than others: How frequently does this blog post? Is this blog linking to others and are others linking to it? Does this blogger post original, opinion, or reactive content? These are all factors that factor into a blog’s authority and determine its place in the active blogosphere.

In short, these are the bloggers that are making the space tick.

The study goes live over the course of this week:

Live today: Overview, and Who are the Bloggers?
Tuesday: The What and Why of Blogging
Wednesday: The How of Blogging
Thursday: Blogging for profit
Friday: Brands in the blogosphere

Late last week part of our indexing system underwent a brief outage. During that time a number of blogs experienced a halt in indexing. Since then, fixes have been implemented and indexing is occurring again. However, because of the outage, a backlog has built up in our spider queues. The spider queues keep track of pings as they come in, so no pings were lost, we just have to process them.

We are catching up as quickly as we can, but in the meantime, please expect delays in indexing, particularly for those on the Blogspot and Wordpress blog platforms. We appreciate your patience as we catch up and thank you for your understanding.

Today, we’ve announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org. If you’re a blogger, you might be familiar with them (and they’ve been part of the Technorati Media network since June). If you’re not, Blogcritics is an online community of thousands of bloggers, and an award winning site. They’re publishing everything from music reviews to articles on politics and technology – to a monthly audience of more than a million.

Why did we do it? It just made sense – as we’ve stated more times than you probably care to hear, our mission is to help bloggers and the people who read blogs. Blogcritics shares this mission, executed in their own unique way by providing a large stage for bloggers to express themselves while giving readers a great array of high quality blog content.

What’s in it for us? Blogcritics brings us closer to an open community of bloggers and the audience that follows them. It also gives us a lot more advertising inventory. What’s in it for them? Our combined resources will help that community grow and expose their work to an even wider audience. We’ll also work more closely with Blogcritics authors so they can monetize their own blogs. What’s in it for our advertisers? They’ll be able to run more fully integrated programs across the site and its related blogs.

I’m thrilled to welcome Blogcritics and their great community of bloggers to the Technorati team. We’re excited at what the coming months hold for both properties.

We're committed to improving our search results and the overall user experience and are taking steps to reduce the amount of spam and non-blog entries that make it into the Technorati index. We’ve made some improvements in how we identify legitimate blogs in order to filter out the spam.

What was the problem?

Large volumes of splogs (spam blogs) and non-blogs ping us in ever increasing numbers. While only a small percentage get through our filters, it is still enough to negatively impact the Technorati experience for everyone. Splogs can show up in search results and blog reactions. Additionally, the high volume of junk pings slows down our systems.

What does this mean for me?

New blogs

In the past, simply pinging Technorati initiated an indexing of a site. This open door policy meant a lot of splogs and non-blogs would enter the system and masquerade as blogs. In order to better filter out spam as well as inadvertent pings to Technorati, we have implemented a few simple review measures to evaluate a site prior to indexing it as a blog.

The review process entails verifying that the site falls within the Technorati Blog Quality Guidelines.

Existing, indexed blogs

As an active blogger already in the Technorati index, we will continue to crawl and index your blog as before. We hope that your Technorati experience will improve. Our service should be faster, search results and blog reactions should be cleaner, and the number of legitimate blogs accidentally caught by our spam filters should decrease.

Links from new sites will be attributed to blog reactions and Technorati Authority when the new site is approved and indexed.

Technorati is experiencing a problem with our search result updating infrastructure. We continue to crawl and save data, however, post search results are stale and temporarily stuck at about 3pm Pacific Fri. Aug 15. Link results (reactions) are stuck at Thu. Aug 14.

We have identified the root cause and are actively working on the issue. We expect to have the system caught up during the evening hours.

No data is being lost, but the most recent posts and reactions are not reflected in results at the moment.

UPDATE:

We have restored our post and tag search results. Link (reactions) results are catching up. We expect the system to be fully restored late this evening.

I was in Chicago last week to participate in ad-tech. The content and speakers struck me as particularly good this time around, with a major focus on social media.

The media shift of the past few years is fundamental – you can’t underestimate this – and it’s critical that brands adapt to life in this new environment. There was definitely an air of urgency on the part of everyone present to figure it all out.

Overwhelmingly, the two main themes I heard were:

Brands need to be part of or at least adjacent to the conversation

Brands need to go where their audiences are versus trying to bring audiences to them

A few highlights and how-tos from the sessions I attended:

The six drivers of brand credibility in social media environments*

• Trust
• Authenticity
• Transparency
• Affirmation
• Listening
• Responsiveness

The conversation is less about brands and more about the issues and topics that surround brands, or that are passion points for the audiences of those brands.

Every brand is different: You might need to blog, you might need to listen and interact or you might simply need to be present alongside the conversation.

Speaking of execution:

The microsite was declared dead. Rising up in its place are media that function as the microsite, but do it one better by putting that content and interactivity where your audiences ARE: conversational ads and channels, widgets.

Even the most universally loved brands have their critics. Look at this new era not as a problem to solve but as an unprecedented opportunity to truly know what people think about you, and to engage with them.

The long tail is where you find influence. Even if a blogger has a relatively small number of followers, the level of influence and trust is exponentially higher than with large, mainstream media

And finally, don’t wait for a crisis to get started. The case studies are there: conversational strategies are working.

“We’re not serving them dinner anymore, we’re at the dinner party.”
- Richard Binhammer, Dell, Inc

Technorati is bringing you that much closer to attending Web 2.0 Expo NYC next month – we’ve got free tickets to give away! As a media sponsor for the event, Technorati has complimentary promotional tickets for the conference taking place Sept. 16-19 at the Javits Center in NYC.

For your chance to snag a ticket, email WebExNY@technorati.com by August 12, 2008. You’ll be entered into the drawing, and notified by August 14.

Good luck!

It’s been a while – – we’ve had our heads down focused on building the business, so we’ve been a little quiet lately. I wanted to bring things up to date with what’s new today as well as fill you in on our core search business.

So we’re launching an ad network…

Why? Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed and to bring audiences to blog content. Given our unique position of running a blog search engine, an ad network geared towards helping blog and social media publishers at every level to make some money just made sense.

We’ve been successful attracting premium brand advertisers to Technorati.com – and we’d like to extend those relationships for bloggers, as well as give our advertisers the deeper reach into blogging and social media they’ve been asking for.

Our first step was a private beta. We assembled a core of like-minded sites, founded to provide community and services to bloggers and to surface the best of blog content to consumers, and were successful in attracting advertisers to the network including: T-Mobile, Toyota, and Verizon.

These sites form the base of the Technorati network’s vertical content channels and reach an audience of 17 million (with that audience increasing very shortly with several other sites about to sign). Over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals. Here’s some of who’s in so far:

• blogtalkradio
• Blogcritics
• blogcatalog
• BlogTV
• GeekAlerts
• GPSMagazine
• NerdApproved
• Technabob

That doesn’t mean we’re moving away from our core. We’ve organized the company into two operating groups – the network and Technorati.com. Blog search is still and will always be the foundation of everything we do.

In our biggest internal initiative, we’re in the midst of a summer-long project to completely rewrite our crawler and search engine. Last week, Dorion addressed some of our recent challenges and fixes. An updated search infrastructure should address of the vast majority of the complaints we receive, greatly reduce spam and give everyone a faster, more efficient utility. You’ll also see significant upgrades to blog claiming and Technorati Authority. Our product team has also spent a lot of this year getting feedback directly from the blogging community and incorporated this into the development of our widgets – as we roll them out a lot of you will recognize what you see.

You’ll see some new features designed for our readers as well, but I’ll leave this for a future update.

We strive to provide a great user experience and that includes fast page load times. Last summer we worked very hard on this effort and for the past many months we have been able to achieve this goal.

Well, I'm disappointed that I have to tell you what your probably already know, we have stumbled a bit the past two weeks. Page load times have been on the rise over the last week and, in a couple instances, the site has been nearly unusable. We are working exremely hard to resolve the underlying problems, but I thought it important to let you all know that we are keenly aware of the problem and, like you, want the site to be screaming fast.

What happened?

A high volume of automated processes (AKA "bots") access our service for various purposes, many with nefarious ones, exhibiting onerous behaviors and often masquerading as human users. These bots can, at times, impact the stability and performance of the service.

What are we doing about it?

We have an ongoing effort to reduce the impact of bots. At times we've had to throttle certain activities particularly around feed and API requests. We continue to upgrade and add new hardware as load dictates. We are also configuring new detection and prevention mechanisms to help ensure that real end user requests are our top priority to serve.

When will this all be done?

Several defenses have already gone live over the past week and these additions have resulted in a significant reduction in backend resource consumption and have stabilized parts of the overall system.

We constantly monitor the system and, as of this writing, have been able to cool things down again very close to our desired response time levels.

We appreciate your patience and understand that many of you have come to rely on our services in your daily use of the Internet. As I stated before, we strive to provide a great user experience. I want to thank the dedicated team I work with who is getting us through this difficult time. I hope you too can thank them when we achieve our goal once again.

UPDATE:

Well, we've had over 15 hours of excellent response times from the system. We have addressed the underlying capacity shortage things have returned to normal. Thank you again for your patience.