Instead, he's going to mine those links to create a real-time news service that would work somewhat like Twitter trends, except that it would track the hottest links rather than the most-used words. The result would be a Digg-like news service comprised of links determined to be important by bit.ly's analysis engine.

“We're seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” said Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web. Sometimes that’s humorous stuff — the other day, the most shared video we saw on the web was William Shatner performing a dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s farewell address.

“But it’s also occasionally very serious. We were able to see the Neda video out of Iran trending well before CNN linked it in, and we’ve begun to refine our capabilities there to be able to pinpoint stories like that.” He said part of this technique involves looking for links being shared by unlike people, because that means they have universal appeal.

Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.

"I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime."

SearchFuel is powered by Outrider, an award-winning, leading global, integrated search marketing agency and direct-to-client division of GroupM Search, the world's largest search marketing specialist. "We see search as a shift in the advertising space. Consumers' expression of intent signifies a change that gets lost in Google's dominance and the tactical discussion of how to be relevant in search results," stated Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search -- The Americas, in the kick-off post on SearchFuel. "The ability to provide a point of view and commentary on the impact this has for our clients, some of the largest buyers of media in the world, is a unique voice brought to the marketplace." SearchFuel will feature regular, relevant posts in categories across paid search, organic search, emerging trends and technologies (mobile search, local reputation management, etc.), and social media marketing (SMM). It will also have regular features, including monthly Q&As with Chief Marketing Officers from market leading advertisers; and in short order will incorporate global perspective from international search experts and posts from guest bloggers across the media expertise.

Starting this week or next, queries on the leading search engine will return links to blogs alongside the images, news, books, local maps and video, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, told eWEEK in a briefing at the company's headquarters here.

Blogs have been gaining significant momentum in the last couple of years, fueled by everything from fascinating news revelations to gossipy snipes. The inclusion of blogs as a genre on Universal Search is a nod to their growing number and ability to get people to go online to find content, which is what Google is all about.

Universal Search is the fruit of a five-year effort involving hundreds of engineers working to refine the company's search algorithms and add multimedia content to its search returns to give users richer results.

The Mahalo Greenhouse is where talented part-time Guides (PTGs) help Mahalo create the best search results on the internet. PTGs create search results in the Mahalo Greenhouse for terms Mahalo has yet to cover, and if our full-time Guides approve the PTGs' search results, those results will be moved from the Mahalo Greenhouse to Mahalo.

Anyone can apply to be a PTG. PTGs are paid $10 to $15 for each search result approved and added to Mahalo.

However, don't laugh. This tiny trick saves me lots of time over the years. Consider this. According to my Google search history I have performed a staggering 31,000 searches over the last two years since they added this feature. Many of these are phrases. Let's argue it's half of them. If I save 0.5 seconds thanks to the dashed-search technique and multiply it times 15,500, I calculate that I have saved 7,500 seconds. That adds up to 125 minutes or two hours! That means I saved at least an hour a year. Plus, that's not counting the tons of other searches on sites the Google history doesn't track.

Your mileage may vary but give it a try.

Topix is following the user-powered models of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project (ODP) of Web links in which volunteers are responsible for creating and editing entries. Topix will avoid the spam problem that sites like Digg have by requiring people to sign up with their real names, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive officer. Skrenta is co-founder of the ODP.

Anyone can submit local news by ZIP code through the Web site or from their cell phone. The citizen journalist idea came to executives after they unearthed hidden in the site's forums a posting from a Texas Minuteman of his first-person experience patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, something that wasn't published anywhere else, Skrenta said.

links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of "trusted bloggers")

links from other sources (mail, chats)

using tags to categorize a post

PageRank

the number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers)

clicks in search results

The popularity of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of that blog document. A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called "news readers" or "feed readers") exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also, subscriptions can be validated against "subscriptions spam" (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them "more popular") by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers.

To rank the search results, Google combines a quality score obtained by mixing those signals with a relevance score (IR score) that depends on the query. "The IR score may be determined based on the number of occurrences of the search terms in the document. The IR score may be determined based on where the search terms occur within the document (e.g., title, content, etc.) or characteristics of the search terms (e.g., font, size, color, etc.). A search term may be weighted differently from another search term when multiple search terms are present. The proximity of the search terms when multiple search terms are present may influence the IR score." (the quote was slightly altered for clarity)

Personal Bee's founder will come in as VP of business development at Technorati; we're not sure whether the value of the target was in engineering, where Technorati's been weak. Any significance beyond that? One person familiar with Personal Bee says Technorati -- which has in the past offered brand-tracking to marketers, ego-surfing to bloggers and search to ordinary users -- plans now to build themed news pages in the style of Techmeme.

Topix.net, the news search site majority owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, has bought its .com domain after paying a Canadian company $1 million in January (late last year Topix received $15 million funding), and is planning to move the site onto Topix.com, reports WSJ. The story, which makes a bigger point about search engine influence on other sites, says it is worried about the effect on its Google rankings after this. About 50 percent of visits to Topix come through a search engine, and about 90 percent out of that is through Google...Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10 percent, that would essentially be a 10 percent loss in ad revenue, CEO Rick Skrenta said in the story. Topix will run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search results.

1. Occupation Project/Halls of Congress DC (Blog list)
2. Chris Simon Cheapshot (Blog list)
3. Simon Two-Hands Hollweg Mar 8, 2007 (Blog list)
4. Canon EOS-1D Mark III Snapping Off Frames Like a House Afire (Blog list)
5. My Chemical Romance UK Single - I Don't Love You (Blog list)
6. South Park Says the N Word! (Blog list)
7. '93 Giuliani ad with Donna Hanover and kids (Blog list)
8. The Third Coming (Blog list)
9. Democrat Hypocrisy on Iraq (Blog list)
10. Monzy performs at Stanford Univ. (Blog list)

WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.

The search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view). The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.

Development on Findory now will slow to a crawl. There may be new features, but they will be rare. I no longer will spend time exploring funding, biz dev deals, or recruiting.

Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had.

It was exciting, challenging, and fun to try to build a startup. I consider myself very lucky to have had that opportunity.

1. 2006 Petition Against Changes in the Livejournal Interface on mother.livejournal.com, linked by 801 posts
2. Colbert Does the White House Correspondents Dinner on Crooks and Liars, linked by 622 posts
3. Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell Of a Commentary on Rumsfeld from Crooks and Liars, linked by 359 posts
4. State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 from Sifry.com, linked by 339 posts.
5. Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on Bush: Who has left this hole in the ground? We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have. May this country forgive you. from Crooks and Liars, linked by 330 posts.
6. Support Denmark: Why The Forbidden Cartoons Matter from MichelleMalkin.com, linked by 307 posts.
7. SNL: If Al Gore were President from Crooks and Liars, linked by 286 posts.
8. Milking it? from EU Referendum, linked by 284 posts.
9. State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth from Sifry.com, linked by 282 posts.
10. State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth from Sifry.com, linked by 269 posts.

A source tells us that the working name for the project was "WikiSearch" until recently. It's clear that Wikiasari will be focused on quality first, depth second. Search results will include tag based navigation, the top three results will be wikipedia content, and the remaining results are determined by sites wikipedia considers to be "reputable" because they are external reference links from wikipedia pages.

Since all search results will be tied to wikipedia, either directly by linking to wikipedia content or because the sites are linked to from Wikipedia, real people will eventually be determining all search results and rankings within Wikiasari. The search engine will be opensource, and the index will be available under a GFDL. Wikia will operate the master version of the index, but others are free to take it under the terms of the GFDL.

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

And from the blogosphere, Perez Hilton is the most-searched blog site of 2006, generating 91 percent more search interest than the second most popular blog site with web searchers, Huffington Post. While Huffington Post provides news and opinions, three of the top five most-searched blog sites this year cater to celebrity gossip news, including Perez Hilton, a.k.a. Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., TMZ, a.k.a. "Thirty Mile Zone" around Hollywood, and Pink is the New Blog. The fifth most popular blog site in 2006 is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people anonymously email their secrets on postcards.

Chinese Internet company Baidu launched its blog search service on Thursday to help Internet users navigate their way through the 20 million Chinese bloggers.

It is the first Chinese search service specifically for blogs.

Yu Jun, a senior executive with Baidu, said the service was based on a database of billions of websites, including all the blogs supported by Chinese blog service providers and individual blog websites.

The new service is expected to boost Baidu's users. Baidu started its space channel last July to provide blog services.

Many people have asked about the meaning of our name. "Baidu" was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. ".hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood." Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.

Original content covering developments in the search space.

Daily blog posts covering search news from across the web.

SearchCap: A daily email newsletter recapping search news from Search Engine Land and across the web. Also available by feed.

SearchCap Monthly: A monthly email newsletter recapping search news over the past month. Also available by feed.

Topix, founded in 2002, aggregates news and categorizes it into topics. Earlier this year, the company added the ability for readers to comment on articles. Topix provides automated related links on some of the Web sites of newspapers owned by the investors and is adding reader comment capabilities to their sites as well. Chris Tolles, vice president of sales and marketing at Topix, said the company would spend the funding on hiring and marketing. Company executives want to double the 25-person staff over the next year, he said. "For us to grow, we needed the money."

But what is perhaps most interesting about the new Custom Search is that publishers (large or small) can allow anyone or selected colleagues, friends or community members to contribute to that index. For example, if I own a site dedicated to stamp collecting and have a group of regular contributors or trusted readers I can allow those individuals to contribute their selections to this index. This gives the index the ability to evolve and grow over time -- and makes it "social."

"A year ago, brands were saying, 'Oh no, not the blogosphere,'" said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-tracking service that last week, in partnership with Edelman, provided results of a global survey of blog use. "Now they're saying, 'Great, this is an opportunity.'"

When Viacom offered $750 million for Facebook in January, he asked for $2 billion and was rebuffed, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Now, he remains undecided about the latest offer, made in the last few weeks by Yahoo. That offer, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed Thursday by two industry executives, one briefed on the deal by Facebook and the other by Yahoo. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are continuing.

To woo Zuckerberg, Yahoo has offered about $900 million for Facebook and says it will keep the company somewhat independent, with Zuckerberg in charge. This has been its model with other acquisitions like Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that lets members share lists of their favorite Web sites.

Back in 1997, I sold Search Engine Watch to what became Jupitermedia. That company later started the Search Engine Strategies conference series. I had a long and prosperous association with both of those properties (USA Today recently recounted the tale here). I renegotiated my contract to provide services for both of them to Jupitermedia several times without any major issues.

Last year, Jupitermedia sold the site and the series to Incisive Media. I wasn't unhappy with the sale and chose to let my contract be extended through the end of 2006 as part of it.

I was concerned about moving forward with Incisive, however. I'm far from the only reason behind the success of SEW and SES, but I've played a major role. I helped build both of those assets. Then I watched one company sell them to another without me having any formal capital stake in the sale. That left me wary of history repeating itself. I wasn't going to help this new company grow the business out of the sheer kindness of my heart.

I explained these reservations at the very beginning of my relationship with Incisive, that I needed some long-term incentive for helping them continue to grow and strengthen the site and conferences. After over a year of talks, that's failed to materialize. As a result, I'm departing.

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from "numb fingers" to "60 single men" to "dog that urinates on everything."

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for "landscapers in Lilburn, Ga," several people with the last name Arnold and "homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia."

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. "Those are my searches," she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release, saying it was an unauthorized move by a team that had hoped it would benefit academic researchers.

But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data.

Technorati has been tracking the blogosphere, or world of weblogs, since November 2002, and I'm constantly amazed at the growth over the years. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Whenever I write about these statistics, I'm always asked by people, "Can it continue to grow this quickly?" Frankly, I can't possibly imagine it continuing to grow at this pace - after all, there are only so many human beings in the world! It has to slow down.

Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.

The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.

From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.

About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.

About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.

About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.

Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.

This is about double the volume of about a year ago.

The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman said. "It was an innocent-enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."

As we've seen more types of information get syndicated, and as feeds are becoming used for multiple purposes, we've been growing concerned about the lack of controls on the distribution of personal data, especially through RSS. For example, you may want to allow your friends and family to subscribe to your blog but you'd prefer your posts not show up in search results.

Along these lines, we recently offered a new way to claim your own feeds and indicate whether you want your feed included or excluded from Blog & Feed search on Ask.com and Bloglines (for more information, read the blog post announcing our Publisher Tools). But this method only solves the issue at Bloglines and Ask.com, and it doesn't address user-created (as opposed to publisher-created) feeds, like flickr feeds, which can't be claimed. Clearly, there is a need for an industry-wide solution.

As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to 'deny' will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In Bloglines, we'll use this to prevent the display of the feed information or posts in search results or any other public venue. If other readers and aggregators use the information in the same way, and publishers of feeds, including services that let users create feeds, implement this standard, we could make significant progress toward making feeds truly safe for non-public information. We think that's a pretty cool idea.

Dabble collects video data from 240 + hosting sites that accept video uploads from people, plus tens of thousands of independent sites. Dabble also collects other sorts of media like audio for searching and organizing. And Dabblers bookmark media they find around the web. Dabble does not host media, but instead, makes media from anywhere on the web searchable, collectable through our bookmarking tool, part of a community, able to be tagged and commented upon, made into playlists and played. Dabble is an organizing tool to help people discover the value of media.

Feedster, Inc., the leader in search and syndication of dynamic content, has announced today that Tyler Goldman will join its Board of Directors and become acting president. Mr. Goldman was previously Senior VP of Corporate & Business Development at Movielink, and founder and CEO of Broadband Sports, Inc. Former president, Chris Redlitz, left to pursue interests in earlier stage companies.

"Feedster is well positioned to expand its leadership in search and syndication." said Mr. Goldman. "With 41 million blogs and feeds being searched dynamically, Feedster provides consumers with the best way to leverage the constant flow of information that is being published on the web. Feedster is well recognized by the technology community as the leading search and syndication engine for dynamic web-published content, including blogs, news and podcasts, and is in the process of expanding this leadership position in newly emerging areas like images and video. As millions of users, publishers and other web-based entities continually generate a vast amount of dynamic content Feedster provides a comprehensive platform to search and syndicate content that is most relevant and timely."

Though there is not yet a fixed way for creating revenue from blog services in China, search engines and Internet portals have in succession launched their own blog services. Sina, Sohu, BlogCN, Bokee.com, ChinaBlog.net and others are already crowding the market.

Tag metasearch engine Gada.be (TechCrunch posts describing the service are here) is getting a name change and a redesign at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle later this week (Chris Pirillo founded the company and also runs the conference).

The new service will be called TagJag (and will be at TagJag.com). Like Gada.be, TagJag can be queried easily from a mobile device.

As for competitors, Gada.be seems to focus on the quantity of the sources searched (200 sources), and seeks to help categorize the sources you search (you can search "Amazon", or a more vaguely, a "geeky" category, for example). Wink relies gives you search results that users have bookmarked, and if it can't find anything bookmarked, it backfills with Google results.

Rumors have been flying lately about the demise of PubSub.com. While I've seen quite a bit of exaggeration in various forums, I can't deny that things are not going well for us. Our days are numbered. A recent attempt to execute a merger has been blocked and we've been blocked from raising equity financing that would allow us to continue to pay salaries and pay off our $3 million in debt. Thus, our "doors" will close soon if we can't find someone to pull us out of the current situation. Persons with fast access to cash and a desire for some of the industry's best technology are advised to contact us rapidly...

But the real reason is once a start up guy, always a geek (I know, say it ain't so!). So what's next? At some point I'll start another company; that's a difficult habit to break. But I'm also going to focus more of my time helping other startups and newbie entrepreneurs, something I'm finding increasingly rewarding. I haven't really discussed that aspect of my career much here on the blog, but I've recently been involved with two startups. When Plaxo first started, I gave them some technical help. More recently, I've been serving on the board of directors of One True Media, a startup that provides some great on-line tools to create and edit videos. I've also really enjoyed my recent speaking engagements, where I've been able to talk about the process of starting a company and some of the lessons I've learned.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster has arrived and we have all been taken to planet Zeus 94 to kneel before Zod. All this is a little much for us to handle at the moment so come back later please. And leave a quarter in the collection tray on your way out.

Today we launched a new feature on Google Blog Search that lets you narrow your search by date. Using this feature, you can track blog posts on your favorite topics according to when those items were posted. We've also incorporated some improvements in search quality that should make your blog-search experience even better.

Ever since Google Blog Search launched, we've noticed that the universe of blogs has truly exploded--our index is doubling every six months. Perhaps even more striking, though, is that there's no one region in the world that leads the growth of blogs. Self-publishing clearly has global appeal, and blogging makes it easy for everyone on the web to share their voices and connect. True, there continues to be blog spam (and we continue to fight it), but our blog search reveals the great range and quality of ideas and writing out there.

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post. For this analysis, Technorati excluded generic or default categories, like "General" or "Diary", which some services put into each post if the author doesn't specify a particular tag or category. We only counted posts that used a non-default tag or category.

The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international

English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.

Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.

Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months

Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.

The Korean language is underrepresented in this analysis

Language breakdown does not necessarily imply a particular country or regional breakdown.

Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.

The rel-tag microformat has been adopted by a number of the large tool makers, making it easy for people to tag their posts. About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them.

We've received a number of reports today that users in China can't get access to the Technorati site. Of course, we're taking these reports very seriously, and we're trying to get more accurate information. We'll let you know when we know more.

It was disorienting for someone used to these services but I find it hard to get worked up about it. Applications such as Wikipedia and Blogspot are growing into such a strong force that they will enter China, inevitably. I predict there will even be Chinese competitors (not just translated versions). And then, we who may now gloat on our access to Technorati, Wikipedia and Blogspot, will find that the last laugh will be on us.

"I am thrilled that IceRocket is uniting with Think Partnership, enabling us to connect the huge and growing blogging community to the business opportunities and network provided by Think Partnership, especially Litmus Media's Valid Click network and PrimaryAds' affiliate marketing network," said Blake Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes further stated that "we have spent significant time evaluating many opportunities within the interactive marketing and advertising space, and have concluded that Think Partnership was clearly positioned as one of the premier companies in our market as well as being a leading edge technology based company with the resources to execute on this exciting opportunity."

"I am looking forward to the completion of this deal and working with Think Partnership. Both of our companies are focused on providing the highest integrity services to our users and building core enabling technology that can eliminate click fraud and "splogging" on our networks in real time." said Mark Cuban, of IceRocket.

A BlogSpot blogger claims that he received an email from Google saying that the MSN Search box he had placed on his blog violated Blogger's Terms Of Service. The reasoning was that the box was "obstructing Googles services from operating efficiently and effectively". The blogger, Roberto Dohnert, was told to remove the search box, and plans asking Google the question on everyone's mind, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Salim Ismail is no longer with the company and has resigned from the Board of Directors. We wish him well in his new endeavors and opportunities.

As we move into our 5th year as a company, we will continue to provide you with the quality service that has made PubSub more popular than ever before. Our user base continues to grow and our relationships with our partners and services to the community will always be our number 1 priority. Over the past 6+ months I have worked internally helping the company focus on meeting its commitments to our partners and the community and look forward to continue to serve the community in any way I can.

Frankly, I would agree with Michael Arrington’s comment that PubSub is a likely acquisition target. They do offer a very interesting service, but as a standalone offering, the opportunities are becoming increasingly narrow. As part of a larger Social Web/Web 2.0 firm with a broad range of products, PubSub’s technology could become the glue that holds the various parts together.

Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)

I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as "Whirlywinds." I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything.

My first assignment came a few days later. "The topic would be 'colloidal silver,' " Whirlywinds informed me. But then he added a caveat: "Please EXCLUDE any negative comments, as I sell this product online."

Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web. I told Whirlywinds I'd rather pass.

A former Wall Street analyst, Sifry developed the technology in early 2002, while working as chief technology officer at Sputnik, a wireless computer networking start-up he had co-founded. On the side, he kept a blog, mostly to expound on tech issues, and he was curious to know who was reading it. So he spent an evening writing software code that would help answer the question. At the time, most bloggers were techies like Sifry or teenagers posting their diaries. But the phenomenon took off, and Sifry's website, which he had dubbed Technorati, was seeing rapid traffic growth and even some paying customers--including The New York Times and Reuters, both of which licensed the technology to track what bloggers were saying about their articles.

The prototype of Google's Blog Search went live at midnight on September 14, 2005. Most of Technorati's work force of about 30 was online, waiting. Sifry spent about half an hour checking it out, then posted a welcome note to his new competitor on his blog, including some friendly trash-talking about all the things Technorati could do that Google couldn't, such as image finding. Then Sifry went home and got some sleep.

There were no big surprises. Google Blog Search, he concluded, was solid but simple. It seemed to have a hard time keeping up with the dynamism of the blogging world; many search results it displayed were more than 24 hours old, which is ages in the blogosphere. On the other hand, Google delivered those results in less than half a second, compared with at least a full second for Technorati. It sounds minor, but in the world of Web search, that's a big difference. "We knew we had a lot of work to do," Sifry says.

Jim explained there are a lot of big plans for Bloglines, which makes sense, since it is a hugely popular service that can drive people to use the rest of the Ask products. He said they were looking to bring Bloglines information to the front page, like a sidebar on the left side, for those who wanted to use that. He said that they were in middle of building a new blog search product, "all based on Bloglines".

Jim was asked about mobile search, and said that they are developing mobile search. He explained that one of the major problems with mobile search right now is that "Mobile search is very slow" right now, and that one of Ask's biggest focuses in developing their mobile search product is ensuring that it renders very quickly on mobile devices.

Here, let's play a game. Everyone in the world say "brrreeeport" on your blog and you'll be listed on this Technorati page automatically. Heh. There are also no pages on the Internet linked to for that term on Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

So, now you too can take down the man! Get your due! Get around the gatekeepers. Tell all those A list bloggers to screw off and die! Heheh. Or, you can let me own that term all by myself! Heheh.

Quick: go to Technorati and do the brrreeeport search. Now, which headline and opening text grabs you? Makes you wanna click? Hint: we're all being slammed with hundreds of sites every day. The more interesting you can make your headline, the better. Think about what your headline will look like in the search engines and use every one as an opportunity to grab a little bit of traffic.

Now, look at the 98 brrreeeport results on Technorati. All are on the same topic, right? But some headlines stand out from the noise. Which ones grab your eye? The one that says simply "brrreeeport report?" Or the one that says "brrreeeport beats Mohammad cartoon?" Conflict is a story telling device. Use it in headlines!

1. Any Authority: This will show all results.
2. A Little Authority: This will show results from blogs with at least one link.
3. Some Authority: This will show results from blogs with a handful of links.
4. A Lot of Authority: This will show results from blogs with hundreds of links.

Search functionality has been simplified. If you remember the old site, the landing page was somewhat messy, and search was a bit confusing. We cleaned this up. As for search results, weve adopted the new RSS subscribe button and we've got a better iteration of subscribing to the feed of a search result than the previous site. You will see that it is much clearer how to subscribe.

Advanced Search - this is coming soon and will include Link Search and FeedFinder.

Simplified Feed Claiming and Icon Uploading - We wanted to make the whole process of working with your feeds and new features as easy as possible. Look for these abilities in the near future. We know that we may have a couple of icons that we didn't transfer over properly, so please let us know and we'll work to resolve it quickly for you.

Simplified Indexing - Another feature we're working on is a better way of ensuring your feed is being properly added and indexed with us.

Powered by a behind-the-scenes tool we lovingly refer to as FloodGate, BlogPulse Live provides a real-time, minute-by-minute view of the most popular topics that bloggers are writing about. Each topical line represents a percentage of all blog posts as they're published (Eastern time). Click on the small chart on the home page for a larger view.

Here's how it works: BlogPulse Live captures new blog entries, and then text-mining and text-analysis technologies categorize the posts into key subject areas, such as "Diaries" (personal journals), "Politics," "Movies/TV," "Technology," "Sports," "Health," "Religion," "Meme," (online game/activity/quiz that's circulated by/among bloggers) "Food" and more.

We're proud to say that Bloglines has experienced tremendous growth, more than tripling subscribers, feeds and articles in less than a year. On January 5th we topped 1 billion articles and we're currently pulling in new articles at a rate of 3-4 million per day. For those number naysayers out there, keep in mind that we only keep articles from feeds that users have subscribed to (which also keeps our splog count lean). For these reasons, we consider ours to be the highest quality blogosphere index that exists.

The Technorati talk bubble appears faded out for blogs for blogs with no inbound links.

If a Top 100 blog appears in the search results you will notice a special button next to the blog name.

Until recently Technorati had a far more meaningful indicator, the actual link-count listed in the search results. If they insist on switching from meaningful numbers to cute graphics, could they at least be more granular, and have a color-coded scheme for major brackets, like 50, 100, 500 ..ect links?

Oops!

Our Chief Scientist is bringing you something new in January!

In an effort to provide the best services possible, Feedster is currently involved in upgrading the programming for this feature. As a result this feature is temporarily unavailable.

If you would like to be alerted when this feature is resumed, please leave your email address and we will contact you when service is once again available.

search for specific text within blog titles.

search for text written by a specific author.

search tags from a specific author.

Today we've begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.

This is a watershed moment for citizen journalism. We're not the opening act anymore. We're now live on stage with the big boys. My only nit is that I wish it included more blogs. Blog results feel light to me compared to other blog-specific tools.