Sifry's Alerts
Tonight is the first meeting of Techorati's first User Group, the San Francisco Techorati User Group (SFTUG!). The meeting will take place at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment (in the loft area) in San Francisco. Niall Kennedy, the TUG founder, will give an overview of Technorati and dive into its APIs. Many of us from Technorati will be there as well.
On behalf of everyone at Technorati, a big thank you to Niall for starting our first ever TUG and we hope to see some of you tonight!
Masahiko Satoh posts an extensive explanation of Technorati in Japanese for folks in Japan trying to understand better what the service does, and how it works. Thanks Masahiko!
Technorati and Digital Garage just announced that we will work together to set up Technorati Japan, which will distribute Technorati services in Japan. Digital Garage is a leading Internet company in Japan, and they're not novices to search - they were the first to bring over a Japanese internet search engine as a partnership with Infoseek, and they are creators and significant investors in the leading price-watching portal in Japan, Kakaku.com (which means literally, “price dot com” in Japanese). Our VP of International and Mobile Devices, Joi Ito, has a long history with the company as well, as he describes on his blog, and it has been a tremendous pleasure getting to know DG's cofounder and CEO, Kaoru Hayashi.
With Technorati Japan, we're going to be bringing Technorati's scale and expertise in understanding the World Live Web to the Japanese. I used to live and work in Japan, and have warm memories of the people and culture, and I'm looking forward to working with DG to build and grow the business there. There's a shift that's happening, as more and more people are connected via broadband and mobile phones and their use of the web becomes even more a part of the social fabric of their lives. We aim to capture and help people make sense of that real-time world of conversations.
So, in real terms, this means that we'll soon have a Japanese Technorati site for all of the Japanese bloggers. We hope to get the service running sometime next year, but we're going to get started right away trying to get people to understand what this real-time web and conversation stuff is all about.
Obviously, Japan is just the first step in our international strategy, and I'm quite pleased that this is Joi's first major international deal for Technorati - it most certainly won't be his last. And last but not least, I'm excited to have Gen Kanai leading up Technorati Japan. Gen is the perfect bridge for us - a veteran blogger with a foot firmly planted both in the US (he grew up in NY) and in Japan, he previously led internet efforts at Sony and Toyota. I'm really looking forward to be working more closely with Gen, and with the folks at Digital Garage.
I'm totally pleased to announce that the Technorati colo move is now complete! We got the job done in 33 hours, which means that we got the entire move done in under 2/3 the time we thought it would take. The new servers are happily being refrigerated in our new facility in San Francisco
I am tremendously proud of the entire team - they worked at this with a 110% commitment, and decided to stay at the office and not go home until the entire job was done. Kudos to the team, you guys kicked butt and pulled it off ahead of schedule. As far as we can tell, the only major unplanned issue we had was a single disk failure on one of our machines, it was DOA after transit.
Still I'd want to apologize for any inconvenience the planned outage may have caused you. I got lots of email from folks who were looking for their Technorati fix. :-)
We are very excited to complete this move as it puts the entire service on much more solid ground, and gives us lots of room for continued expansion and new features. If you have something specific you would like to see added to the service, don't be shy, send us a note asap to feedback@technorati.com.
By the way, there is a small chance that we overlooked something as we were re-assembling our site, if you notice something out of place, please do send us a note, again, to feedback@technorati.com and we will get right on it.
We can't thank you enough for being patient through this with us. It is our goal to be of service to you. Thanks again for using and enjoying Technorati.
As we've announced on the main site, Technorati is moving servers this weekend! We're moving from our old colo to a Tier 1 facility with overprovisioned electricity, HVAC, good security, fire control, and all the trimmings. You can watch the progress too, by keeping track of this Flickr photostream... We should be back up by the end of the weekend. My apologies to those of you who have emailed us hungry for your egorati fix.
We've just made it easier to find out what people are saying about anything on the web, anytime. The new Technorati This favelet can be used in three ways to put the power of Technorati to use on any web page you're browsing:
We've been using them internally for a while, and it really makes a difference in my web browsing experience to get a quick view of what people are saying about any particular article, web page, company, keywords, or blog post.
Adam Bosworth put up a transcript of his talk from ICSOC 2004, and it is quite deep and profound. I'm too busy to add more commentary right now, but if you haven't had a look, it is definitely worth a slow read - there's lots of good meaty stuff in there, very resonant with my experience of software and service development and delivery. Worse is most definitely better.
Congratulations to the Blogger folks: InfoWorld: Blogger goes multilingual.
The folks on the Technorati team have been working really hard on a number of fixes, improvements, new features, and UI simplifications and tweaks that we've just rolled out.
The most significant improvements:
We're working on continuous core service fixes, tweaks, improvements, and new features as well, there's still so much more to do. When we go live the new features and enhancements we've created will also be available using our APIs as well (more documentation at our Developer's Site )
So here's the deal: We're looking for feedback, suggestions, criticism, and comments. Top of mind for the team is how we can be of service to you, to bloggers, and to folks who care about this user-generated content. We made so many of these changes and improvements because of you - your suggestions were incredibly useful to us.
Thanks again for all your support in the past, I hope that we can continue to be of service to you.
Thanks to some initiative and hard work from Kevin Marks, we've put up a page that tracks Vote Links. Vote Links allow you to add some more information to a link when you make it - it allows you to “vote-for” “vote-abstain” or “vote-against” the hyperlink. These votes are mutually exclusive and represent agreement, abstention (or indifference), and disagreement with the contents of the link.
Here's an example: If you want to show your approval of John Kerry and disapproval of George Bush, you can do it the following way:
<a rel="vote-for" href="http://www.johnkerry.com">John Kerry</a>
<a rel="vote-against" href="http://www.georgewbush.com">George Bush</a>
When you make your post using one of the major weblog tools, Technorati will get notified of your post, and will add a count of your vote to our Vote Link tracking page.
By the way, you can vote for or against ANYTHING. For example, you can let people know that you like the EFF and hate the KKK - allowing you to link to organizations and sites that you disapprove of, without bestowing approval or authority on the link.
Right now, this is a complete experiment, and the page should be considered alpha. It could be reorganized or removed at any time. We're really interested in hearing more about what you think, send us feedback and let us know (or give us some votes about the page itself!)
If you want to see how all this works, use “View Source” on this page, check out the Vote Link documentation, or have a look at the HTML snippets we put on the Vote Link page itself. And all you US Citizens: Don't forget to vote in the elections!
