Technorati rolls out Percolator and Blogger Central

Technorati rolled out its latest effort to fine tune its blog search service today, with a renewed focus on the blogger community and new ways to discover content, according to company CEO Richard Jalichandra.

"We are going back to service the bloggers," Jalichandra said, who took on the roles of president and CEO two months ago when founder David Sifry left the company. "There has been a lot of feedback from those who thought we lost our way with bloggers. We created Blogger Central, which is the first phase of putting all resources Technorati has for bloggers and the conversation about blogging in one channel." Blogger Central includes a river of posts about blogging and over time will include more tools for bloggers, such as for helping to monetize blogs, Jalichandra added.

Technorati is also introducing Percolator, which bubbles up the most authoritative, and possibly best, blogs for six topics. Jalichandra described Perculator as a topical presentation layer to discover what is going on right now. In concept it's similar to TechMeme and Blogrunner, but it doesn't give you one click access to the full blog post or news story.

Percolator results are algorithmic (unlike Mahalo, for example), based primarily on linking behavior. The new discovery aspect of Technorati also looks at mainstream media, not just blogs. "It's what bloggers are interested in and what is getting attention," Jalichandra said.

Technorati currently has about 11 million unique users per month (internal logs), under 50 million pages per month, 65,000 new posts per hour, 2,800 fresh links per minute, 112 million blog records and 300 million social media objects, such videos and images linked or tagged from social networking sites.

Jalichandra said he is putting the structure in place at the 30-person company to reach profitability, or break even on a run rate basis, by the end of 2008. "We are bringing in the pieces and people to monetize the traffic via advertising. It's new to the company, and I am confident in our product and the critical mass of our audience," he said. He noted that in the last 90 days ad inventory has increased by 200 percent and by 400 percent year over year. Sprint is a launch sponsor for the new Tech channel.

Technorati has $21.6 million in financing via three rounds and will likely do one more round to get to profitability, Jalichandra said.

Technorati's primary competition is Google blog search. "Today only two companies are doing real time indexing--us and Google. We have done a relatively decent job as 30- person startup compared to 13,000 people at most successful company in history. It's David to Goliath, but we are still out in front in pure blog search," Jalichandra said.

I asked Jalichandra what's next for Technorati. "We will continue building the media discovery process, moving forward with more granular sub-channels. This is what we can do in the first two months--put something out now and continue building and polishing. We'll also continue to enhance and update the core technology, the search infrastructure and spider."

Creating more sub-channels is key for Technorati. With only six Percolator channels, Technorati is competing not just against Google but against all the aggregators, like Techmeme and Blogrunner mentioned above, that so far have done a better job of creating blog/news clusters for relatively broad topics with less cumbersome user interfaces.