Blogging from Hunter's Point

Christian Crumlish

Drove over the bridge and past the ballpark to Technorati's new digs for thei first Developers Salon

I took pictures but forgot my adapter so will post them later.

Promise some new infopr0n - some new analytics that hasn't been out yet (Mary's research).

Dave is asking for an open discussion

Intro technorati team. Liz, director of developer relations. Has worked with Dave in the past. ... "This is kind of a thank you for all of you being enthusiastic about Technorati."

Richard Ault, product marketing, product management, background

Mike Perry, director of engineering

Ian Kallen, one of our senior engineers - neat demo to show off later.

Kevin Marks, one of our principle engineers. Also has some cool stuff to show off.

Mary Hodder... no introduction.

"And last but not least our guru," says Dave, "who I've learned a tremendous amount from ... helped me define what I wanted to do ... markets as conversations": Doc Searls.

"Guru for hire," says Marc Canter.

Zack Rosen just walked in. (Good, I've been needing to talk to him for Chapter 2!)

Brief history of Technorati. Dave's alerts, egosurfing, manual updates, wanting to find conversations and participate in them. Thanksgiving, 2002.

2002: 3000 new weblogs every day
Jan 2003: 3000
Mar 2003: 4-5000/day
Jun 2003: ~6000
Sep 2003: 8-9000/day
ETCON end of 2003: ~10,000/day
now: 11-12,000/day (flattening out)
new weblog every seven seconds

"...and you get a dollar for every one of those weblogs, right?" (Kevin Burton, laughter)

200,000 updates/day

2.14 million weblogs now

Is the rate of increase leveling out?

Q: What's a weblog from the Technorati point of view.

1. Do they ping us?
2. Heuristics to look at (reverse chron, microcontent, ... but weblog is as weblog does).

Have gotten pings from the New York Times

Editorial judgement, extremely light, goes into top 100 list.

Vast majority one author

Q: What percentage of blogs ping directly?

A: around 80% (including polling changes.xml files and people who actively ping technorati affirmatively).

Technorati can give you a PNG fle to incorporate into as a web bug in the final approval step of a content workflow to automatically ping them without having to know XMLRPC, etc.

Q: How many die - just get left? ...

They just redid the API code, released today at their developers site... They all work, they offer RSS as well as custom XML, all content is UTF-8 (for example, to get Chinese encodings right).

While the nuances of internationalization vs. localization are discussed, I'll post these notes....