Okay, this is exciting and it's been really hard to keep it a secret until now: Technorati has completed our first major acquisition, a great company called Personal Bee. I'm excited about this for a number of reasons, which I'll get into in a moment, but let me summarize by saying that Personal Bee is going to add some very powerful and engaging social publishing features to Technorati.com. And, the Bee platform will help expand Technorati's Conversational Marketing System, our product that helps brands to engage their audience and enter the global conversation. (You can see examples of the system in place on sites like Shut Up And Sing and An Inconvenient Truth)
Now the details: Personal Bee is a media collection platform that enables the each of us to curate and publish our own personal sites around topics, issues, or anything else we choose. It lets anyone (that means you) create and update collections of interesting citizen and mainstream media, publish them to a personal or public page, and start a following. I've been using it for a while now and let me tell you: it's fast, it's easy, and it's FUN.
It's all about democratizing the media. Social media has always been social for the people creating it, and now the people consuming it will get to join the fun. Anyone can be a publisher without having to write a blog, create a video, or anything else. All of us, the people formerly known as the audience, can create and publish collections of many forms of media, and attract our own audience if we choose.
For content creators and brands, recreational and professional alike, this will offer a whole other range of benefits. The Bee platform makes it quick and easy (turnkey, if you will) to create and deploy conversational and informative micro-sites full of dynamic and engaging blog posts, videos, photos, podcasts, and more. It allows these folks to foster communities quickly, and it'll give them the tools to monitor and manage the ebb and flow of information at their discretion.
Ted Shelton, the founder of Personal Bee , will be joining the Technorati team as our VP of Business Development and he'll have an important role helping to bring the two technology platforms together. There's still a lot of work to be done; lots of code to crunch, and lots of features to deploy. But whether you're a publisher, a reader, a brand, or all of the above, I hope you'll view this new range of services as helpful, useful, and more than a little fun, so check back often because great things are happening as we speak.
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Technorati Tags: acquisition, personalbee, conversationalmarketing, technorati, tedshelton