I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:

Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.

Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.

Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.

Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more context-rich, deeper view into the data.

BookTalk (formerly called Hot Products), a listing of the most talked-about books, DVDs, and other products in the blogosphere in the last 24 hours.

Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog" codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.

Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.

A few points to note:

Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough. Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.

We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or email subscriptions yet.

Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.

Thanks again for all your support.