Technorati makes first major acquisition

This is the first major acquisition for San Francisco-based Technorati, which says it tracks more than 72 million blogs and 230 "tagged media objects," such as videos, podcasts and photos, in real time. Personal Bee, which is based in Berkeley, Calif., lets members--or "beekeepers"--create their own public or private pages based on news topics that interest them. Technorati expects that Personal Bee's technology can benefit its site as well.

Personal Bee itself will remain intact. "By joining forces with Technorati, we are adding flexible publishing capabilities, so that everyone can find conversations, track up-and-coming ideas and stories, and customize the 'Live Web' in any way they like," Personal Bee founder and CEO Ted Shelton said in a statement Thursday.

Financial terms of the deal were not released.

In a blog post, Technorati founder and CEO Dave Sifry said that "Personal Bee is going to add some very powerful and engaging social publishing features to Technorati.com." Sifry added that the technology behind the acquisition will also be used to bolster the Conversational Marketing System, a set of tools marketed to companies aiming to connect with bloggers and social-media-driven online communities.

Shelton has been made Technorati's vice president of business development and has been assigned the task of integrating the two companies' platforms.

Personal Bee is not Technorati's first acquisition, but it is its first major one. According to a company representative, last year Technorati acquired blog performance monitoring site GrabPerf, which continues to operate independently of the main Technorati site.