Richard Jalichandra was lured in as the CEO of Technorati, a site that bills itself as providing: “Real-time search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or keyword. Also provides popularity indexes.”
Technorati competes with Google and IceRocket and to a lesser extent, memetrackers such as TechMeme, Megite and Tailrank.
By way of disclosure, I actually know Richard personally though not very well. He was the IGN executive that courted my old company and handled the negotiations of our sale to the Brisbane-based video game publisher.
After IGN was itself acquired by Fox Interactive Media, he left to advise a handful of companies, including Pixsy (one of the video search engines that we index in our video meta-search, MetaMojo.com). He was an entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures, and by way of Battery’s investment in Technorati, he moved in to the CEO’s job this week.
Today in an interview with Wired, he referred to industry sweetheart TechMeme as a “nice little site”. When I saw that, it surprised me, but I thought I was alone in thinking twice about it. Apparently not. Invariably, Michael Arrington pounced on the quote and drilled both Technorati and Jalichandra.
My problem with the non-stop Technorati bashing isn’t the criticism itself, it’s the focus of the criticism.
First off, we need to ask: Should blog search tools be judged based on what users (people who look for info) think or what bloggers think?
If it’s the former (what people who don’t blog but mainly look for content on blogs), then Technorati is not perfect, but it’s a fine product. If the judge and jury are bloggers, then invariably Technorati falls short, but so does Google, Ice Rocket and according to 99.9% of bloggers, TechMeme.
In other words, yes, it’s fair to blast Technorati for:
They missed huge opportunities - Techmeme (rapidly passionate readers), MyBlogLog (social network around blogs) and Sphere’s related search product (stole Technorati partners like WSJ and Washington Post) are all opportunities that Technorati just plain missed, and shouldn’t have. All of those “great little companies” could have added up to one big company, and Technorati could have been it.
But the part about Technorati’s authority being off, I figure: thank God.
All the talk about authority is more about bloggers’ vanity and caste mindset than anything else.
Today Om Malik - a genuine gentleman and scholar - emailed me and said he liked my post on Google’s doing 40% of US ad revenue in the first half of 2007, and apologized for not linking to it because he was - get this - flying. Mate, why apologize? Is there a secret code that we need to link to one another and build up this private boys’ club? Can’t we just read things and not link right and left (we should credit when we write an article but do we need to link to one another just for the sake of doing so?).
There must be. This week alone TechMeme (admittedly a great site built by a great entrepreneur with a great outlook) was taken over by somewhat pointless topics. Pointless, in my opinion, and to a few others, but clearly not to the elite that make up its content composition because it was non-stop.
To me, and many others, it lost a lot of authority frankly, yet we give it props for being a good source for judging authorities of bloggers, even though it is largely contained to a select elitist few bloggers.
This is not a knock to Gabe Rivera’s TechMeme, which I agree is the best product in the broad blog reference space, but to put TechMeme on such a pedestal and defecate on Technorati is unfair.
Technorati, in all fairness, as woeful as it might be on so many levels (and it is on many), does have some interesting assets. Mind you, having gone through $20M of funding, I sure hope they have something tangible to show for it.
Technorati: Buyer or Seller
One more thing about my experience with Richard: he’s a buyer, not a seller. Sure, he knows M&A, but something tells me that Technorati is actually looking for a few select acquisitions be it in search technology, blog reference tools or dare I say it, blog networks that have proliferated over the years. Maybe that is the “unique media experience” Jalichandra was talking about in his interview. Content is so the way to go in a sea of user-generated content, spam comment etc., so don’t be surprised if some of the blog networks get consolidated by tech players.
Anyway, I’m guessing, and am probably wrong, but if history repeats itself, and it usually does, then expect Technorati to make a few deals (just like IGN bought Rotten Tomatoes, Team XBOX before selling itself to IGN Entertainment) to make itself look prettier.
Merger in Sights?
One more thing about Richard, he’s a pretty good executive to court young, talented, ambitious entrepreneurs. So something tells me that behind closed doors, one of Jalichandra’s mandates is to actually open up talks with TechMeme, or Tailrank, or Megite, or dare I even say it Digg regarding a potential merger of sorts. Digg is actually quite complimentary with Technorati. Both companies are not easy sales right now, together they become interesting.
One more thing about IGN’s history: it merged with leading competitor GameSpy, basically combining 2 of the top 3 players in their category (with CNET’s GameSpot being the odd man out) and marched towards a $650M exit to News Corp.
Mind you, it’s tough to dice up who is larger, but I don’t think Jalichandra or even Battery would have an issue merging as the smaller entity if it means landing with Digg or TechMeme and “making the pie higher”.
I’m not insinuating that Technorati is smaller than TechMeme, but Digg, perhaps.
Imagine former CEO Dave Sifry sitting down with Rivera talking about a potential merger… that chat would not have lasted and the mere thought sounds crazy, but with Jalichandra leading those talks, it’s less crazy.
One thing about Jalichandra’s hire is that Richard is not (this is not a knock) a product guy, he’s not an engineer, he’s not a sales guy; he’s a dealmaker, so there won’t be any sacred cows.
After having plunked down $20M, Technorati could actually get smaller - but it could also get more complex - via financial engineering.
I know what you’re thinking, Rivera has delivered a gargantuan product with relatively little resources but he is a one-man show and every entrepreneur realizes that having more resources helps. Rivera could raise a whopping amount of money via VCs or angels, but as I’ve written before, right now, scaling is not obvious.
Meanwhile, Technorati does bring a lot of know-how and reach across the blogosphere and would allow TechMeme to really hatch similar services in more verticals that entertainment, politics, sports and technology.
For the record, I don’t think Rivera would agree to any of this nonsense because Technorati comes with a lot of baggage, but hey, we’re here to speculate…
People, it’s Early!
Much the same way that the 2003 Iraq war helped bloggers rise to prominence and 2004’s Presidential Elections catapulted them further into the limelight, I definitely expect blogging to evolve and grow in popularity in the years to come, particularly with the Elections just around the corner (regardless of what Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere would suggest).
Blurry Blogosphere
Ultimately, however, the critics are right, much the same way that mainstream sites have proliferated the blogging ranks, the lines between blogger and any given website has blurred enough to make it hard to draw the line. Does Technorati still have a raison d’etre? I am not sure, especially when indeed, Google indexes everything and anything almost as fast as Technorati does, and probably more relevantly.
So, with all of this said, is Technorati a buyer or seller?
It depends, let’s see:
- Google’s blog search is top notch, I don’t think they need it either.
- Yahoo! bought MyBlogLog and you have to wonder just how much weight they’ll put behind all-things-search as Google continues to gain momentum in search… so Yahoo! is a fit.
- MSFT is always an option, especially as it aims to become more of an advertising-based entity.
- Ask.com bought Bloglines but that is a reader and not a search product, IAC’s Barry Diller has said that they’ll look at anything that walks, though valuations are too rich for his taste.
- Time Warner is busy “finding itself”…
Perhaps News Corp.? Not crazy. What about CBS. News is changing… and those companies would be intrigued… ultimately it boils down to price.
$20M invested, what would the company ask for? Apparently in 2005 the board turned down $90M and asked for $150M… would they get even a $90M offer today? Who knows.
But if I were Battery, the Board or Jalichandra, I’d probably take a cue from IGN’s playbook, make a few acquisitions, then merge with one player and restore Technorati to its promised greatness.
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