Technorati Weblog: My First Week on the Job

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As our VP of marketing, Derek Gordon, said to me: “Welcome to the Blogosphere!”</p> <p>I promised that I would spend my first weeks on the job really listening and over my first seven days as CEO of Technorati I’ve already heard much that is instructive and useful. First and foremost, I want to say thank you for your feedback and for thinking deeply about how it is Technorati can be a success. I also want to say that I’ve heard from the blogosphere loudly and clearly about the decline of our service quality. </p> <p>For instance, it’s clear that removing filtering tools and making tag search results inseparable from keyword search results was a mistake. We're going to correct that as soon as possible. We know now that filtering results by the source blog's authority is a powerful tool that visitors to the site depended on. We also know now that we alienated bloggers who tagged their blog posts, say, as being about Facebook (a really nice little company, I might add) by burying them with all blog posts that mention Facebook. </p> <p>Also, stability and uptime has been a problem: there’s no sugarcoating this. As many of you know, we’ve been engaged in a process of moving our co-location facility out of 365 Main here in San Francisco to a new facility. Doing a move of this kind while keeping the site live was daunting (and I can’t thank our ops teams enough for the late nights and lost weekends throughout – by all accounts, they were heroic) and, unfortunately, resulted in inconsistent service delivery. But I’m happy to report the move is done, no lives were lost, and we’re already seeing dramatic service improvements as a result.</p> <p>And, I’ve learned from our teams that we have more work underway to bring forth other great aspects from our treasure trove of data; to enhance crawler accuracy; to reduce indexing latency; and to bolster system stability.</p> <p>Lastly, I’ve learned that while the core of everything we do is in blog search – without question, we must do that very, very well – Technorati also needs to provide more than basic search results in order to be a successful business. We also need to be a place where people can not only search, but are surprised and delighted by a discovery process that highlights the best of blogs and the media those bloggers are talking about, and deliver it all in near real-time.</p> <p>This is a very tall order. But Technorati has a team of incredibly committed and extraordinarily talented people working hard every day to make this vision a reality. And we’re listening – every day – to the feedback you give us. 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Technorati Weblog: My First Week on the Job