When I look up Technorati on Technorati today, the top results (e.g. Michael Fioritto, paidContent, Om Malik, and John Battelle) carry news that we've received venture funding. Some of you may wonder why we generally don't bother talking about investment stuff. Isn't it news, after all?

Making a big deal about VC investments is unnecessary, it seems to me. One of the biggest reasons for the dot-com crash was an imbalance of attention: far too much on investments, and far too little on building real businesses with those investments. In a sane and sober business environment, the proper ratio should be completely customer-focused.

In our case, we're putting our investments to work building infrastructure and providing service to a population that's growing at an explosive rate. Frankly, we'd rather talk about that than about the money others have invested in us. Right now our staff is just thirteen people, all sprinting a marathon. As you probably know, our struggles have been no secret. My last two posts were about those problems and what we've done to get past them. We'll have more problems, I'm sure. (Esther Dyson says "Always make new mistakes.") But I also think we've made good progress, especially considering the steepness of the hill we've chosen to climb.

Perception is often a trailing indicator. That's how I regard remarks like Michael Fioritto's "Maybe now the site will start working, for a change..." That change came several weeks ago. Technorati's performance is far from ideal; but it is improving. Please keep banging on it and let us know how we're doing and what we can do better. That's the kind of investment that helps the most.