Lots of people already know who Technorati is (show of hands). The track what's happening on the web Right Now, mostly weblogs. 4.1 million bloggers tracked. Seven minute turn-around from post to seeing it in Technorati.
They see the web as not the world's biggest library, but a piece of the social fabric of our lives. Weblogs are the exhaust of a person's attention stream over time. (Heh. A brain fart?) But you can see things on a micro (one person) and macro (many) level. They use authority (a PageRank like system to see who links to who) to rank. This is influence. It has nothing to do with truth.
The timing of links is important. You can figure out who really gets the new first. Who are the topic experts?
Weblogs are growing like mad. Doubling in size every 5 months or so. English is no longer 50% of blogs. A new weblog every 7.4 seconds (12,000 per day).
Looking at posts/day across all weblogs, you can see major news events as spikes in volume, such as the Nick Berg beheading. Today we see 400,000 posts/day or ~4/second. The Krptonite Lock story was big too. Bloggers beat the mainstream media by 5 days. The company had no idea until the mainstream got it.
Weblogs vs. Big Media chart. A lot of bloggers are getting similar attention and influence.
The rise of the corporate weblog. Sun, Microsoft, blog software companies, etc. 5,000 exec and corporate bloggers today. That's not many --yet. PR is shifting at these companies in a big, big way.
RSS adoption is low in the blogging world--31.2% of all blogs have RSS feeds. Full-text feeds are even less popular. Only 28.2% of RSS feeds are full-text.
Influencers produce RSS. RSS gives people more ways to pay attention to you!
What's coming? Make it easier for readers, developers, etc. APIs goodness. Technorati and SocialText Wiki integration. Hackathon tonight.
See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.
Posted by jzawodn at October 06, 2004 11:52 AM
