Technorati’s CEO search

Technorati, the blog search engine, is searching for a new CEO… I guess it would be snide to suggest that their search will take forever, miss the obvious candidates and eventually time out with no results? Oh well.

To be fair, Technorati is a site I use every day, which puts it in my top 10 most used sites, easily. Most people with any interest in blogs will be similarly heavy users; it’s the best way one can track inbound links, references on keywords and surges in interest on specific subjects. I’ve got lots of Technorati watchlists coming into Netnewswire which have often, over the years, been the first warning of something interesting cropping up in the blogosphere on stuff around my work, my interests and this blog.

It’s also an admirably open company, thanks to current CEO Dave Sifry’s blog – a blog which also comes up with keenly read State of the Blogosphere report from time to time.

But the curious thing is that Technorati, for all its popularity, has failed to attract much warmth or admiration from the constituency it has served in its four years on the net. Its relationship with bloggers went south as the site struggled to stay up as it grew, and ultimately no amount of PR 2.0 (Sifry’s blogged mea culpas, explanations, promises) can get around something simply not working. Technorati’s technical wobbles remain a serious reason for both bloggers and businesses not to work with it in any serious way.

If analysis elsewhere is to be believed, Technorati badly needs to find out how it can make some money. That clearly comes down to exploring better ways to exploit its information. Trouble is, the information it serves up is also, too often, too crude. Yet the potential is huge. I remember talking to Blogger’s Ev Williams back in 2002 about the power of a service that could, in his words, “index and aggregate and present to people [blog content] in all kinds of different ways”. He was talking about pulling together communities of related (but unconnected) blogs, and the way he described the potential sounded wonderful to me at the time. It would have thrown fuel on the microcontent fire by democratising dynamic content discovery; the perfect (and necessary) follow-up to the already-democratised dynamic content publishing.

Five years on, nobody is really doing this yet. Technorati, which came along soon after that conversation, always looked like the service that always wanted to deliver this functionality, but never really got there. Yes, it was down too often, but it was slow, it missed stuff, it got spammed to hell and back, and it always seemed to lack an engine, and an interface (or just an idea) that could gather quality stuff together rather than just lots of stuff. Meanwhile upstart startups like Daylife are already doing more interesting things around aggregation and widgetisation, even if they work with different material and lack the scale of Technorati’s stuff.

Meanwhile Ev Williams and Blogger got bought by Google, of course. No such luck for Technorati, which is doomed to compete with the search giant, instead. Whoever gets the CEO position – assuming they find someone – has got a hell of a job to do.