The Internet moves at a staggering pace. In a single day it gains more news, blogs and twitters than you could read in a lifetime. Fads come and go over night and it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep track of what is relevant. This is where Twittorati comes in.
From the guys who brought us Technorati, one of the top blog search engines on the net, Twittorati aims to sift the gibberish from junk, tracking tweets from the highest authority bloggers and posting them in a way that’s meaningful and easy to follow.
It’s all about ‘authority’ and what determines a blogs authority is the number of unique blogs that link to that blog. The technology for this is the same as Technorati. In fact Twittorati incorporates blogs from the Technorati Top 100 and promises to include “many more of the web’s most influential voices.”
It’s certainly a good idea but after a brief look on the website I couldn’t actually find I was genuinely interested. Sure it’s all convenient, at any time at anytime I”m only a few clicks away from the highest authority blogs and tweets on the net but therein lies the problem.
There are no rare gems, no cult hits and no must know info-bites. Having a high authority does not mean it’s a good blog. Take a quick look at the front page, how much of that do you actually care about? Very little I bet. Well it’s not all bad and it really depends on how much you care about tweets in general.
The NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.
But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.
But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.
Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:
For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.
Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.
Have you ever spent a lot of time searching around the Internet to find the perfect social media button that can be added to your site? Well stop searching and head over to MySocialButtons. MySocialButtons does what it says on the can and offers free social networking icons and buttons to download. Buttons include TTwitter, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon and come in various different colours, styles and sizes.
I have been receiving a lot of emails lately from webmasters using Technorati Media as their ad network. Techn0rati is a blog search engine which launched an ad network back in June last year. At the time it was very big news, because Technorati was losing its way a little bit and also traffic at the same time. Thus, they launched Technorati Media which would open up a new revenues stream. At the same time Technorati purchasedAdEngage which would be the backbone of the Technorati Media platform. AdEngage is a basic self service advertising platform which deals in CPC display advertising.
Anyways, Technorati Media launched their ad network with a lot of media attention and were offering some amazing CPM rates, in which was going to entice a huge amount of small and medium blogs. However, now since the economy is in a bit of a decline ad revenues have dropped but this is nowhere near the amount Technorati Media’s CPM rates have dropped.
I’m not too sure what Technorati Media is trying to achieve because using the current model they have for advertising, I’m sure they will be in a huge amount of trouble come the end of 2009. The economic crisis is not going to be fixed over night and it will take a couple of years to sort itself out, so Technorati please think of another advertising solution. CPC campaigns are great for advertisers because they get an instant return on investment for their money, but CPM is great for publishers because they can see a return on their investment. Technorati Media is struggling even to sell CPC campaigns even with some great sites on board, so this spells big trouble!
Disclosure: Im CEO of Adphilia which is a site representation company.
NewsGator has announced today that they have launched a new product called AdBurner. AdBurner is a program that provides a turnkey advertising based solution for premium publishers, which helps them to optimise ad revenues around key web 2.0 technologies with no incremental effort.
AdBurner is aimed at optimizing the CPM for, and process of, inserting and managing advertising into NewsGator’s publisher products suite, including services as diverse as widgets, related content, and iPhone applications. The initiative is built around best of breed advertising partners Technorati, Admeld, Gigya, Medialets, and Tremor Media.
This is a very interesting moving from NewsGator and Im very keen to test the product for them. Currently, the new product doesnt seem available via their website, so would be great to hear from the NewsGator team.
When you have an urge (we all get it), or a task that requires you to go sifting through blogs, what is the first place that comes to mind? Technorati of course. It is an established player in a fairly open market which has seen their superiority fairly untroubled. Until now?
Enter, stage left, Twingly.com, a Swedish blog search engine founded by Martin Källström.
According to Twingly.com’s ‘about‘ section, the philosophy behind their search system is to produce “a blog search engine featuring a spam-free, faceted, social search for the global blogosphere”. Nice, but aren’t Technorati and URLFan doing the same thing? Twingly uses relationships, ie how well linked each blog and article is, to work out how relevant to your search they are. Key to the service is a blog’s ‘approval’. If a blog is not approved by the Twingly team (meet them here), it could potentially be spam. If you are the owner of a blog that comes up as not being approved, you can of course resolve that little issue by sending the Twingly team a swift e-mail.
You can express your opinion on the blogs Twingly finds via a fluorescent green ‘links/likes’ tab. This shows you how many people are linking to the page and it allows you, once you’ve signed up to the service, to vote on if the post is relevant or useful – it’s the equivalent of Technorati Favourites.
Where it gets really interesting though is the blog profile page. With some nifty “research”, we can compare Crenk’s ranking on Twingly, Technorati and URLFan.
Crenk is ranked 3/10 (10 being the highest) with 43 blogs registering as being linked to various articles on Twingly. Technorati claims 80 and URLFan says 45, with 199 other mentions. These are vastly differing numbers, and you have to wonder if Technorati is brilliantly accurate or if it’s not omitting that nasty spam.
Some other nice touches from Twingly include the ability to search within a certain timeframe, <em>as mentioned</em> you can search by one of the 12 supported languages, and you can also look for blogs that have been officially approved, thus weeding out any other possible spam.
Twingly have also released their top 100 blogs by ranking, and if you are proud of where your blog sits in their 1-10 scale, you can of course throw on that all important badge to show it off. One rather large omission however, is the Huffington Post.
With this in mind it is safe to say that Twingly isn’t the most accurate blog search engine, yet. However, the layout is simple and practical, and although the ‘likes/links’ updating isn’t instantaneous (it took about ten minutes to register), the future looks very bright for the Twingly team who are currently overseeing about 25 million searches per month.
Twingly has the potential to be a very good blog search engine. It looks good, is quick when pulling together results and the blog profiles, in relation to each other, are very useful; it even has some pleasant widgets to pop alongside your page ranking.
They are very much into their feedback in Sweden, and you can vote for your most wanted features at the Twingly Tech Plan page.
Try Twingly.com out for yourself and let us know what you think.
Technorati Media has finally launched their Engage (advertising marketplace product) live. Previously this new tool was in Alpha stage and only certain people could use the product. This all happened because Technorati purchased AdEngage.
Since purchasing AdEngage and launching Technorati Media I think Technorati has really lost sight of what their core business model is!
Technorati was a blog search engine that doesnt currently have really market share and presence and their product offering seems to be going down hill by the day. To compensate for this they purchased AdEngage and launched Technorati Media, which is just an ad network.
Looking at the current results from this ad network which has been in operation for several months, seem to be very poor. They are selling advertising for blogs such as The Inquisitr and Profy. The results seem to be as follows, for CPM advertising they are offering a decent CPM rate in between $1.00 – $2.00, but ads are currently only for the USA market and even then their fill rates arent 100%. For all other countries they suggest to use Google Adsense, which is fine, but unless you have a huge amount of USA traffic then this isnt really worth the effort, because what you make on USA revenues you lose on Google revenues elsewhere. In terms of selling sponsorships they also seem to be terrible, with The Inquisitr having 2 125×125 ad slots in the sidebar in which they havent even been able to sell 1 for a few months.
This is all about Technorati realising they dont have a search engine product that is any good, so they are looking for additional revenues streams which will help them eventually sell the company. Is that the way it is or am I wrong?
Founded in 2005 in an unlikely city in Scotland, Pete Cashmore has turned his dream of up to the minute updates on everything tech, media, web, and social networks into one of the most profitable blogs in history, Mashable. With over 5 million monthly pageviews, anyone that makes it on the site either in an article or as a sponsor for the site is sure to be seen by the who’s who of the online media world.
Mashable has been highlighted in Technorati, the New York Times, Washington Post and Forbes, while being a fan favorite to interact and catch up on the latest events. Mashable’s contributing writers are all published and established writers that look to be a part of a much bigger blog. Just recently Pete and the Mashable team put on a Mashable Tour with their partners of Social Media Camp. This multi-city tour highlighted presentations from the best of web and media minds and afterwards offered an excellent opportunity for these minds to mingle.
Currently Pete Cashmore divides his time between San Francisco, New York, and the UK. He’s constantly staying abreast of the latest trends in social networks, and hosts monthly events to keep the conversation going.
I have personally met Pete during one of the Mashable tours here in Austin, and was amazed at how cool and approachable he was. He literally took photos with all the hundreds of people that attended the after party and was truly interested in talking to everyone.
Mashable is a definite site to subscribe to, and make sure to follow Mashable on Twitter as well for even more information then you think you can handle. Just watch out for the overload!
Technorati, one of the worlds largest blog search engines has spent a long time trying to find a new model for their company and today I think they have launched a great offering. Introducing Technorati Media. Technorati Media is the new blog advertising network for anyone and everyone. The advertising network will not open fully for another couple months, but you can apply now and hopefully get in early.
Technorati has been testing their ad network for a while already and seem to have found some good results. The ads will be sold by CPM method, in which allow a little more security for publishers within the network. Im always interested when new blog networks enter the market and I cant wait to see what results come from this new network. Here at Crenk we have already signed up to this service, so cant wait to report to everyone our findings.
Technorati has made some small changes to how they calculate their authority for inbound links. Previously they were counting all links made to blogs on a given domain. Eg. forum.techcrunch.com was counting towards Techcrunch, even though they are seperate. Now they arent counting these links and this has really moved around the top 100. Make sure you head over and see what has now happened to the top 100 weblogs.
Sites taking big hits were Engadget, Gizmodo and Techcrunch.
Interesting news has come our of Technorati today: former boss David Sifry has announced changes that will help bloggers again, like in the old days of Technorati.
Changes include:
Change of design and results on search pages.
Authority filtering. You can now narrow your results based on authority, which really only goes so far when tryign to evaluate the usefulness a blog, or if it is a spam blog.
Charts. You can now see the popularity of a word over time.
New Server Farm. They recently moved from 365 Main to a new colocation center.
It is good news to hear that Technorati is back and trying to satisfy their core customer base that helped them get to where they are today. Recent redesigns have completely turned away several numbers of bloggers from the service and although these changes are going in the right direction, im not too sure if they will be able to get all the bloggers back. Time will tell! Technorati stick to your core customer base, cause Google owns the rest of the blog search market!
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Have you ever spent a lot of time searching around the Internet to find the perfect social media button that can be added to your site? Well stop searching and head over to 
NewsGator
When you have an urge (we all get it), or a task that requires you to go sifting through blogs, what is the first place that comes to mind? Technorati of course. It is an established player in a fairly open market which has seen their superiority fairly untroubled. Until now?![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9a8a8402-cc65-42d8-8c9b-8a061bc32212)
