• Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
• Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
• Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
• Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
• Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
• Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
• Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
• Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
• Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
• Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
• Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
• Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
• Cedric Maloux
• Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
• Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
• Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
• Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
• Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
• Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
• Esteban Sosnik
• Esther Dyson (EDventure)
• Felix Petersen (Plazes)
• Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
• Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
• Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
• Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
• James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
• Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
• John Markoff (The New York Times)
• Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
• Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
• Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
• Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
• José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
• Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
• Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
• Lars Hinrichs (XING)
• Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
• Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
• Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
• Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
• Megan Smith (Google)
• Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
• Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
• Nikesh Arora (Google)
• Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
• Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
• R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
• Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
• Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
• Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
• Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
• Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
• Thomas Crampton (Next Media)

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.

He left mid-2006, enduring his fall from Rupert Murdoch's grace by playing advisor to Pixsy.com, a image and video search, and MyYearbook.com. For his troubles, he seems to have acquired an unhealthy orange glow. Hopefully he'll be able to fix, at the very least, Technorati's appearances, if not its substance.

For Sifry at Technorati, of course, the sermon was blogs: That the "blogosphere," a term he helped popularize, was growing exponentially — never mind that many of the blogs Technorati counted were fakes, created by spammers to fool search engines and Web surfers. That this realm of blogs required search tools to navigate, tools that would somehow be distinct from workaday search engines. That the currency of blogs was not traffic, readership, or engagement, but "inbound links" — the back-scratching links provided by one blogger to another, in the name of bloggy solidarity.

The sermon proved false, of course. Blogs are just another form of content, easily searched with existing tools, once they were updated to account for a faster pace of publication. And advertisers rapidly learned that "inbound links" counted for little, and existing Web-tracking research firms could easily turn their attention to those few blogs which grew large enough to draw the interest of marketers. Sifry, spurred on by fervor, refused to see that — or acknowledge it. And finally, faced with the inability to reconcile his vision of the blogosphere's endless growth with the reality of cutting Technorati's expenses through layoffs, he avoided the hard decision by abdicating his role as CEO.

Furrier, too, has delayed facing hard realities. He's typical of the early podcasters: A geek with a lot to say, convinced that his self-involved patter is interesting. Furrier is clearly a persuasive type, enough so to have lured spokesblogger Robert Scoble away from Microsoft and to have gotten him to stay at PodTech, despite the increasing damage to his reputation.

What he hasn't done, however, is assemble content that a mass audience finds interesting. PodTech's lineup of channels remains thoroughly niche, and the company's flirtation with humorous programming ended disastrously, with the public meltdown of toxicly unfunny "comedian" Loren Feldman.

For Technorati and PodTech, these are exactly the moments when professional management is needed: Someone clear-eyed enough to see opportunities others might miss, but clear-headed enough to recognize when a founder's vision doesn't match reality. But hiring someone like that require the evangelist to swallow his ego and admit he might be wrong. Sifry, replaced by a temporary committee of underlings, hasn't done that; nor has Furrier, who tapped his COO to replace him.

Evangelism has a place in the business of technology. Without it, we'd all be scrapping over tiny slices of stagnant markets, instead of embracing growth. But evangelism is no substitute for achievement. Nor, in the end, is an evangelist a replacement for a real leader.

Of course, 365 Main's generators failed. The company blames a memory chip in a piece of electronics used to start the generators automatically. But aren't these generators tested monthly? 365 Main notes that the component in question is only used in two of its datacenters. No word on whether the faulty testing procedures are also common to all of its facilities, or just present in San Francisco.

And the kicker? 365 Main brags about the fact that it has "delivered 99.9942 percent uptime to customers," which sounds impressive until you do the math and realize that means the 365/7/24 facility is actually out of service, routinely, for nearly half an hour every year. Last month's outage, in other words, was all in a day's work for 365 Main. On top of that, consider this: It's a failure rate six times as high as the "five nines" standard 365 Main promised when it launched. 365? More like 364.98.

Here's the press release. I recommend you trust it as much as you do the "365" in 365 Main's name.

365 MAIN REPORTS ON ROOT CAUSE OF GENERATOR FAILURE

Company Implements Fix for All Affected Generators and Makes Information
about the Fix Available to Data Center Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Aug. 1, 2007 - Data center developer and operator 365
Main Inc. is issuing information today that details the root cause behind
why back-up power generators in the company's San Francisco facility failed
to start during a PG&E power outage last week, resulting in approximately 40
percent of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up
to 45 minutes.

The Problem

At 1:47 p.m. on Tuesday, July 24, 365 Main's San Francisco data center was
impacted by a power surge caused when transformer breakers at a local PG&E
power station unexpectedly opened. PG&E has still not determined what caused
the breakers to open.

Typically when a power outage occurs, the outage triggers 365 Main's
rigorously maintained and tested back-up diesel generators to start-up and
take over providing power supply to customers. 365 Main's San Francisco
facility has ten 2.1 megawatt back-up generators to be used in the event of
a loss of utility power. Eight primary generators can successfully power the
building, with two generators available on stand-by in case there are any
failures with the primary eight.

However, following the power outage last week, three of 365 Main's 10
back-up power generators, manufactured by Hitec, failed to complete their
start sequence. A complete investigation of the incident began immediately.

Within hours of the incident, an international team of specialists was
deployed to 365 Main's San Francisco data center facility to join on-site
technicians and begin systematically testing the generators in search of a
root cause. After days of thorough testing around the clock, the team
discovered a weakness in an essential component of the back-up generator
system known as a DDEC (Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller).

The team discovered a setting in the DDEC that was not allowing the
component to correctly reset its memory. Erroneous data left in the DDEC's
memory subsequently caused misfiring or engine start failures when the
generators were called on to start during the power outage on July 24.

The Fix

The investigation team discovered DDEC issues on each of the failed Hitec
units and were able to successfully simulate failure. A fix was introduced
by altering the timing of a command to the DDEC component, allowing more
time between the engine shut-down command and the DDEC reset command. Once
this fix was introduced, the Hitec generators successfully passed more than
50 consecutive start-up sequence tests without incident.

The testing methodology was performed by Hitec specialists along with 365
Main's chief technician and staff. Specialists from Cupertino Electric were
present during all testing, and EYP Mission Critical Facilities will provide
independent verification of the findings the week of 8/6/07.

365 Main has implemented the DDEC fix in its San Francisco and El Segundo
facilities. Of the five data centers in 365 Main's portfolio, the San
Francisco and El Segundo facilities are the only ones with Hitec generators
containing DDECs. All other facilities feature other brands of generators
or have different models of Hitecs.

365 Main is sharing the discoveries of its investigation with other Hitec
customers. In addition, Hitec has expanded its preventative maintenance
procedures as a direct result of discoveries made during the 365 Main
investigation.

In the wake of the outage, 365 Main published an apology to customers and
daily updates directly from the investigation team meeting minutes, allowing
customers and the public at large to track progress. A complete archive of
these updates and more details about today's update are available at:
http://www.365main.com/status_update.html

Chris Dolan, president and CEO of 365 Main, said, "365 Main has a track
record of providing customers with data centers that are considered to be
among the world's finest. We extend our sincere apologies to customers who
were impacted by this incident. Addressing customer concerns is our top
priority. In the days since the incident occurred, we have identified and
corrected the root source of the problem and are taking steps to prevent
this type of problem from happening again. We are also making our
comprehensive findings available to other data centers to try to prevent the
same problem from recurring elsewhere."

Glenn Ellis, president and CEO of Hitec USA, also commented: "Our top
priority is taking steps to prevent this type of unforeseen incident from
occurring again. We sincerely apologize to 365 Main and its customers that
our generators failed to deliver the continuous power as designed."

365 Main's Track Record

Since its inception over five years ago, 365 Main has delivered 99.9967
percent power uptime to customers across its five-data-center portfolio.
This includes the outage experienced in San Francisco last week. 365 Main's
San Francisco facility has delivered 99.9942 percent uptime to customers
during the last five years, inclusive of last week's outage.

As part of their service level agreements with 365 Main, 365 Main customers
receive rent abatements (refunds) in the event that electrical power is
dropped in the section(s) of the data center where their servers are
located. 365 Main is honoring all service level agreements with affected
customers.

The tip, which I printed verbatim, came in by AOL Instant Messenger — not the most trustworthy of mediums, I'll grant you, but one favored by sources trying to preserve their anonymity. Despite my misgivings, I trusted the tipster for the following reasons:

• He IM'd me at 2:14 p.m. Pacific, only 27 minutes after 365 Main lost power supply from PG&E, before anyone outside the datacenter knew details of the outage, claiming to have information from a friend who worked there.
• I pressed him for some details and established that his connection to 365 Main was plausible.
• He gave me a first and last name, and told me that he worked at a large software company. I established that there was a real person with that name who worked at such a company.

Contrary to what some blogtards have written, I didn't invent the tip, or make the tipster up. We had sustained IM and phone conversations. And my tipster, for what it's worth, continues to stand by his version of events. But I'm the ultimate blogtard for not checking him out more thoroughly. I've since learned that the tipster has associations with a band of hackers who delight in social engineering, the art of using technical means to get human beings to do their bidding. And if he belongs to such a band — which he denies — I played right into their hands.

Why? I'm told by people close to the hacker group that they do this kind of thing for sheer amusement. That they enjoy harassing people in the Web 2.0 world. That they have broken California's privacy laws by illegally recording telephone conversations, among other misdeeds. (I'm not going to name them, because they'd just enjoy the attention.)

Before you condemn me, though, let me say this: Yes, I'm an experienced reporter who ought to have known better. While I worded the post itself cautiously, the headline should have reflected that same caution. It didn't, and I apologize as well for that. But in running Valleywag, I'm experimenting in a new medium and a new style of journalism. Yes, I take tips over the transom. Yes, I post early and often, and factcheck, update, and correct as I go. And yes, this is why you read blogs.

And I also should say a bit about why I was inclined to believe the tip. 365 Main CEO Chris Dolan personally gave me a tour of his facilities a few years ago. He showed me the generators, the flywheels, the systems. He led me to believe that 365 Main could ride out an earthquake, with its supplies of fuel and water.

Based on what Dolan told me, I found it more plausible that an employee, acting maliciously, could take down 365 Main's power than something as insignificant as a power outage. Protection from power outages, after all, are precisely why companies put their servers in datacenters with supposedly redundant systems.

I hope no one will come away thinking that, because of my error, 365 Main should come away from this free from blame. Big questions remain about its outage. The company itself admits it still does not know why half of its generators failed. Four of those five generators failed because of "problems in [their] start sequence."

Think about that: Why would four generators fail, for the exact same reason, at the same time? I have reason to believe that, for reasons of his own, my tipster may have been trying to deceive me, and through me, you. But I ran with the tip because it had the ring of truth. Something very wrong happened at 365 Main on Tuesday, and we still don't know what it was.

365 Main has denied that there was any "employee misconduct." With its investigation admittedly incomplete, however, I'm surprised it would make such a claim. As I've pointed out, the datacenter's credibility is very low. (And before you say it, allow me: As is mine.) Customers are fleeing fast. My latest tip, if you care to believe it: Technorati plans to move 500 servers out of 365 Main by September.

There's a simple step 365 Main's management can take to staunch its customer losses: After finishing the investigation, post the video from the datacenter's 24-hour surveillance tapes to the Web. Show exactly how its employees behaved during the outage. Or they could release the tapes to me, and I'll review them, and post about what I saw.

Feel free to doubt me. After relying on a source I no longer trust, I deserve it. But until management at 365 Main concludes its investigation and releases its surveillance videos to back up their version of events, you should continue to doubt them, too.

• 365 Main's facilities are supposed to be rock-solid, designed to ride out a major event like an earthquake. CEO Chris Dolan personally gave me a tour shortly after his team revamped the datacenter. Unless he was exaggerating to me then — and, one presumes, exaggerating to every customer he's since signed — a power outage shouldn't have taken 365 Main out.
• 365 Main has multiple colocation rooms, or "colos," in the center. Colos 3 and 4 — on the same floor, if memory serves — went down, while Colos 2 and 8 stayed up. Data Center Knowledge says that an additional, unspecified colo lost power. (According to a current customer, not all of 365 Main's colocation rooms are occupied, because the facility is constrained by power supply, not space.)
• Was there a drunk employee? Harris, the ever-so-believable 365 Main flack, is denying "employee misconduct." But that doesn't rule out someone else with access to the building tripping the emergency-power-off switch on the affected floor. Bad timing? Sure. Impossible coincidence? No.
• What caused the long lines outside 365 Main? Apparently 365 Main's customer-authentication system was down, forcing already-angry sysadmins to wait in line while guards checked IDs manually.
• Were customers' contracts breached? Almost certainly, if they negotiated any decent service-level agreements with 365 Main. Heard about any lawsuits filed or payments sought? Send in those tips.

Now, from commenter somafm, a highly detailed account of what he believes happened.

Here's what really went down at 365 Main:

365 Main, like all facilities built by AboveNet back in the day, doesn't have a battery backup UPS. Instead, they have these things called "CPS," or continuous power systems. What they are is very very large flywheels that sit between electric motors and generators. So the power from PG&E never directly touches 365 Main. PG&E power drives the motors which turn the flywheels which then turn the generators (or alternators, I don't remember the exact details) which in turn power the facility. There are 10 of these on their roof.

The flywheels (the CPS system) can run the generator at full load for up to 60 seconds according to the specs.

There are also 10 large diesel engines up on the roof as well, connected to these flywheels. If the power is out for more than 15 seconds, the generators start up, and clutch in and drive the flywheels. There are no generators in the basement. (There is a large fuel storage in the basement, and the fuel is pumped up to the roof. There are smaller fuel tanks on the roof as well. )

Here's what I think happened. Since there were several brief outages in a row before the power went out for good, it seems that the CPS (flywheel) systems weren't fully back up to speed when the next outage occurred. Since several of these grid power interruption happened in a row, and were shorter than the time required to trigger generator startup, the generators were not automatically started, BUT the CPS didn't have time to get back up to full capacity. By the 6th power glitch, there wasn't enough energy stored in the flywheels to keep the system going long enough for the diesel generators to start up and come to speed before switching over.

Why they just didn't manually switch on the generators at that point is beyond me.

So they had a brief power outage. By our logs, it looks like it was at the most 2 minutes, but probably closer to 20 seconds or so.

This afternoon a power outage in San Francisco affected the 365 Main St. data center. In the process of 6 cascading outages, one of the outages was not protected and reset systems in many of the colo facilities of that building. This resulted in the following:

- Some of our routers were momentarily down, causing network issues. These were resolved within minutes. Network issues would have been noticed in our San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland facilities.

- DNS servers lost power and did not properly come back up. This has been resolved after about an hour of downtime and may have caused issues for many GNi customers that would appear as network issues

- Blades in the BC environment were reset as a result of the power loss. While all boxes seem to be back up we are investigating issues as they come in

- One of our SAN systems may have been affected. This is being checked on right now

If you have been experiencing network or DNS issues, please test your connections again. Note that blades in the DVB environment were not affected.

We apologize for this inconvenience. Once the current issues at hand are resolved, we will be investigating why the redundancy in our colocation power did not work as it should have, and we will be producing a postmortem report.

A source close to the company says:

Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.

We're sure 365 Main will deny that such a thing could ever happen. And, conveniently, the neighborhood is having power troubles, too. But here's a question: When you have several levels of redundant power, what could bring your customers' servers down other than something like an employee physically ripping the plugs out of the wall? Or, with less effort, hitting the emergency-power-off switch that San Francisco's building codes require 365 Main install?

Update: Technorati's Dave Sifry just sent this email:

Folks,

I just wanted to let you know, it looks like San Francisco is having a MAJOR power event, with outages from the Financial district all the way down to Daly City. One of our colos at 365 Main Street has experienced a power outage (never mind that they always swear up and down that this kind of event can't possibly happen, oh no, they have multiple redundant systems and they charge us up the wazoo to make sure that we'll have business continuity, so of course, this isn't really happening, oh yes) however, our other data centers are all up and running, so we hope to be back up and running as quickly as possible.

I'll keep you all updated on progress, and I appreciate you bearing with us as we work our way through this...

Dave

Subsequent coverage:

• Angry mob gathers outside SF datacenter
  
• 365 Main outage causes aftershocks in Web world (photo gallery)
  
• 365 Main's credibility outage
  
• Investigation continues into 365 Main's outage
  
• Drunk editor kills the gossip item you care about

Prelude: What's trolling?
Trolling is saying:

• All the people I like from the PodTech podcast network tell me they don't like their boring company.
• Technorati is a disappointing blog search engine (especially considering the outstanding team working there) that's lost its focus with weird features like "Where's the fire" and a daily "Buzz" show; it wants to become a portal, but it's doing this all wrong. Meanwhile the actual search engine sucks. Luckily for Technorati, so do all its competitors.
• Startup culture is boring because there aren't enough clever dicks like Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis.
• Wired News bloggers think linking to Valleywag makes them look cool.

See what I did there?

Prevention: Don't stick your neck out.
Some of us just have to pick fights or declare ourselves king or something else that makes us a target. But if you can suppress this, you'll be hard to troll. For example, if TechCrunch or Valleywag ever wrecks itself, crowds will gather to laugh at the carnage and use our burning corpses to light marshmallows. If another Silicon Valley blog, Om Malik's GigaOM, went tits up, there'd be no glee. The other two are brash (TechCrunch's editor says he wants to replace CNET; Valleywag is just a dick to everyone); Om is just sane, strategic, a worker. Therefore, fewer trolls.

Response: Don't respond.
So someone trolled you, and you're pissed. You have a really great response. You're gonna take that troll down and make him cry! Geez, you are so playing into the game.

Do nothing. Repeat this to yourself. Then go do something unrelated. When anyone brings up the troll attack, say "Oh, I didn't really think about it" and change the subject. When they bring it up again, feign boredom. Not amusement (the laughter behind "Oh man, it's so great that they compared me to Bush!" rings hollow), not frustration at your idiot friend's persistence with this topic, but boredom. And a new topic.

If you must: The snappy comeback
Granted, some people are smart enough to craft a good response to a troll. How can you tell if you're one of them? Well, do you troll people? Are you strategic? Are you witty? Are other people reporting on the trolling incident and asking for comment? Jesse Oxfeld, then-editor of Valleywag's New York sister blog Gawker, could say "yes" to all this when fellow gossip blogger Perez Hilton published the phone numbers of him and his colleagues. So Oxfeld delivered dryly, "We're thrilled to see that [Perez] has learned to use the phone book."

Here's how to properly compose a comeback:

• Belittle the troll by belittling their attack. (Not their person; people have more sympathy for a person than for a dumb move.)
• Raise a good point. (Obvious but often missed.)
• Don't be self-righteous. (You lose the game.)
• Be witty. (If you're wittier than the troll, you win.)
• Don't attack in kind. (That just raises the stakes for round 2.)
• Consider saying "mea culpa." (Wittily.)
• Never let them see you bleed.

Photo: Genista. Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. He's proud that after he criticized the awful programming of his last trolling victim, PodTech, the company responded with a front-page video that called him a cheap whore.

Technorati Top 100
What it does measure: How many sites have linked to a blog
What it doesn't measure: How many people read a blog

Blog search engine Technorati runs the most famous "top blogs" list. Getting on the Technorati 100 is the most-often cited sign of success among bloggers; at least 1800 blogs wrote specifically about the list; many bloggers want to get into it.

A high Technorati rank isn't directly related to high readership. For example, #3 is TechCrunch, a blog with just over one hundred thousand daily views, while #4 is Gizmodo, a blog with over a million daily views. A mid-range blogger like media expert Jeff Jarvis gets a disproportionate rank because so many of his readers are bloggers; they quote and link to his posts from their own sites. (So Jarvis does deserve to be on the list; the links show that his realm of influence extends beyond his own readers, out to their readers.)

Henry Copeland, president of the Blogads network, recently showed what top blogs get major traffic:

But the same graph shows there's an indirect relationship; a blog with one hundred daily views isn't going to pop onto the top 100, and a blog with millions of views a day will show up on the list, even if it's a bit lower than it should be. Note Perez Hilton, whose 100 million monthly readers probably aren't bloggers who will link to their favorite articles; thus his low Technorati rank.

Is it worth struggling to reach the top? Not really. Technorati counts links back to 2002 correction: back 180 days from the present. All of the top twenty blogs are over a year old; three of the top four are at least four years old. A high Technorati rank is not a goal but a sign of real dedication to a blog; it's more a lifetime achievement award than a "best of the year" prize.

BlogPulse Top Blogs
What it measures: The blogs most who got the most links today
What it doesn't measure: Long-term popularity

It's the daily version of Technorati's link-based list. Look at the list for today and, say, a month ago, and you'll get a feel for what's popular now. BlogPulse's list will show more new blogs than Technorati's, though a lot of Technorati's caveats still apply.

Forbes 25 (and other magazine lists)
What they do measure: What blogs are read by Forbes writers
What they don't measure: Anything objective

Why do bloggers feel they haven't "made it" until they get profiled in a magazine? After all, Forbes's top "web celeb," Jessica Lee Rose, gets anywhere from 100 thousand to 1.5 million viewers when she acts as "Lonelygirl15." What's one more million readers in Forbes?

Lists in Forbes, CNET, and other news outlets are editorially based. That means that inclusion depends on getting on the publication's radar. Copeland finds that it helps to be male and coastal.

So is it worth schmoozing reporters to get in Forbes? Please. These lists drive traffic to themselves, not back to the subjects. Some magazines don't even link to blogs from their online pages. What a waste of attention. But hey, if you'd rather feel famous than be famous, go ahead and suck up.

Bloglines Most Popular Feeds
What it measures: Which blogs have the most subscribers
What it doesn't measure: Which blogs have the most one-time visitors

Most blog traffic still comes from visitors clicking over to a web page. But more and more readers are subscribing to the RSS feeds of their favorite blogs. These dedicated readers won't see the ads, headers, and any other extras from the blog's web page. Instead they see just the new content, served in a feedreader. Bloglines, one of the most popular feedreaders, lists the most-watched blogs.

I presume this is a fair representation of the blogs with the most regular readers. Do note that Bloglines recommends certain feeds to all readers (like the Bloglines News feed), so those will be skewed high.

Two caveats: This list will skew geeky. A celebrity gossip blog like Perez Hilton attracts readers who've never heard of RSS. Hilton's regular readers are more likely to just type in PerezHilton.com every day. Also, some blogs rely on drawing loads of traffic to one post. Gawker Media's Consumerist earns loads of one-time readers with posts like "Confessions of a T-Mobile employee," but not that many people need to read each of its consumer-advocacy posts day in and day out. Measuring Consumerist by the number of Bloglines subscribers would be like measuring NBC by the number of people who leave it on all day: helpful, but not the whole story.

Blogads Network
What it does measure: Honest-to-goodness traffic for the blogs that sell ads through Blogads
What it doesn't measure: Traffic for anyone else

One thing can get bloggers to report solid traffic numbers: advertising. Blogads puts its own ads (served from a Blogads server) on partners' sites, so it can remotely track partners' traffic. Of course, plenty of blogs don't use Blogads, so this is only a partial list.

Blogebrity's List
What it measures: What blogs are popular among a tiny third-party audience
What it doesn't measure: Any real numbers

Blogebrity, the blog about bloggers (but in a celebrity way, not that boring "how to optimize your SEO" way), recently relaunched with voter-determined A, B, C, and D lists. (Disclosure: I edit Blogebrity's blog. I don't manage the list.) Readers vote how famous a given blogger is, and the votes are combined to form the definitive lists. The site gets precious little traffic, so the rankings will be skewed until more people vote. Treat it like a Q-score: it's not about who gets read, but who gets known. Campaigning to top Blogebrity's A-list would demean you, even to that guy trying to get into Forbes.

Photo from Geek Entertainment Television. Nick Douglas writes for Blogebrity and is internet famous at his vlog, Look Shiny. Technorati thinks he owns Valleywag.

I have no idea, so I made them up. Hey, if Yahoo does it, so can I.

Wikipedia

1. boba fett death disputed
2. tricia helfer
3. perl vs. python
4. futurama in-jokes
5. africa deletion insignificant

Flickr

1. kitties
2. super-saturated landscape
3. photos with bad blur passed off as "artistic"
4. blogger conference
5. sky
6. sky
7. more damn sky

Facebook

1. hazing law
2. hot girl sociology 201
3. if 100,000 people join this group al gore will run for president
4. up for: "anything i can get"

BangBrothers

1. math homework
2. recipes
3. productivity tips
4. stock market
5. children's games
6. complete works of shakespeare

Digg and Reddit (these were oddly identical)

1. awesome
2. amazing
3. pics
4. video
5. digg vs. reddit
6. wtf is a false dichotomy

Technorati

1. that blogger conference i saw on flickr
2. spaghetti monster places of worship
3. giztoto— engageme— cruncherbot— whatever blog knows when i can get an iphone

Craigslist

1. "free rent"
2. "free rent" -"free sex"
3. drum circle
4. my stolen bike
5. w4m
6. ww4m
7. wwwwww&dog4m

This is an installation of Diggbait, a daily column by Nick Douglas, who also writes for Eat the Press. He likes robots, words, and hospitalized kids (but was only kidding about putting them there).

Out of all the potential search results they could have displayed, why did they choose what they did for the Know It section?

We here at Valleywag blinked.

Daily Vlog for October 20, 2006 [Technorati]

• Man, this is not the New York Times's best weekend. Their latest gaffe: calling Peter Hirshberg, chairman of blog search company Technorati, the CEO. Poor tech blogger Om Malik was afraid CEO Dave Sifry had been ousted. But Sifry replied on Om's blog that he's still in charge. He tells me the mix-up was probably an innocent mistake by the Times; no one interviewed Sifry for the article. [GigaOM]
• The campaign blog to free imprisoned medical marijuana dispenser Sparky Rose says that his prosecutors claim he had "no previous work history prior to the pot club." Rose was a high-rolling dot-com founder — same thing? [Free Sparky]
• CNET launches a new title called Crave, because the world needs yet another gadget blog. [Crave]
• Who wins the battle of YouTube vs. MySpace, now that the latter is aggressively moving into online video and breaking YouTube vids embedded on MySpace? Google wins, of course. [BusinessWeek]
• NY Times columnist Joe Nocera says Carly Fiorina's memoir of her time heading Hewlett-Packard is a revisionist history — she lies about earnings, he says, and her book should be called "It's All About Me." [NY Times Select]
• Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner will pay all his journalists to run their own blogs — presumably so no one else leaves like B2 writer Om Malik to start their own media empire. [I Want Media]

What's wrong with the latest Technorati video

1. Can we do this without it sounding like there's a full cafeteria behind the camera? If you can't get a studio, at least quiet down the office for ten minutes. Clearly that's all it takes to film your show.
2. Aaron and Liz, practice your lines.
3. But get a teleprompter too.
4. "One other blogger suffices to say"? Where did you learn grammar, boy?
5. Didn't you watch the "Get a Mac" commercials? You can't use "touch " unless you make a point first.
6. Liz. Put down your hands until you learn how to use them.
7. Is it the microphone making Aaron's voice come in through the right speaker or did the sound editor have a Bloody Mary for breakfast?

And that's what's wrong with Technorati's video today. Until they post today today's, because I'm writing this at midnight. Okay. Let's do some news.

Technorati vlog for October 11 [Technorati]
Earlier: Technorati's new daily vlog: Less talk, more techno [Valleywag]

The major disappointments:

• Co-host Aaron Crane can't stand still, distracting attention from co-host Liz Dunn.
• The premise is that Technorati knows what's top news, right? Surely the rich database of live information streaming through Technorati can tell the vloggers more than "Gee, people are riled up about that Mark Foley scandal."
• Speaking of Foley, the show covers the story by rehashing a few three-day-old details. We already saw this on the Daily Show, guys.
• The filmmakers use stutter-filled takes instead of reshooting until the hosts nail it. Throwing up a first draft insults viewers. (Case in point: Valleywag posts.)
• Who the hell is this Louis Black wannabe "pontificating" about "bogus blogs"? Can he slow down and explain what he's talking about?
• The show ends with another week-old story, the "men's bathroom etiquette" video using Sims to simulate the danger of talking in the boys' room.

Technorati can fix this show — train the hosts, add links below the video, and dig deeper into the news instead of parroting headlines. Maybe then it'll be worth five minutes of your life.

Technorati Daily Vlog [Technorati]

The video is just talking heads, so you can open this one in the background and listen while you update your MySpace work.

Behind The Scenes At Technorati [Ryan Is Hungry]

The Economist, July 2002:

IT WAS an essential ingredient of dotcom business plans and conference slide-shows: Internet traffic, went the industry's favourite statistic, doubles every 100 days.... Unfortunately for the telecoms firms that rushed to build networks to carry the reported surge in traffic, it wasn't true.

So where did the claim come from? According to Andrew Odlyzko...the short answer is WorldCom.

Technorati founder Dave Sifry, August 2006:

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.

(Okay, let's be fair, Sifry says the growth will eventually slow. Right after Technorati gets sold to Fox or Viacom.)

The power of WorldCom's puff [Economist]
State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 [Sifry's Alerts]
Kevin Burton: The Numbers Don't Lie [OnoTech]

As part of his duties running Technorati, Dave Sifry writes a seasonal "State of the Blogosphere" report. One purpose is to demonstrate the blog search engine's growing importance as the blog world explodes. Sure, it's exploding, but Dave can't decide how quickly. Watch him magically change the past:

• October 2004: "The slowest rate at which the blogosphere has doubled in size is once every 5 months."
• March 2005: "The blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months."
• August 2005: "The blogosphere has just about doubled again in the past 5 months, and that the blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months."
• October 2005: "The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months."
• February 2006: "The blogosphere we track continues to double about every 5.5 months."
• April 2006: Dave's words: "The blogosphere we track continues to double about every 6 months." No word about this doubling being slower than before.
• August 7, 2006: "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."

That's right, it's always been doubling every six months. Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia. As the Party says, "Who controls the past controls the future."

State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 [Sifry.com]

What does it mean for Technorati? The company has a strong engineering team, which made Technorati the most precise and comprehensive blog search engine — better than Google's or Yahoo's blog searches.

But this year, many long-time employees have bailed — marketing director Richard Ault, community manager Niall Kennedy, engineer Jason DeFillippo and star designer Derek Powazek. Is Technorati losing the team that made it great? Is that why it's acting desperate for a buyer?

Y! [Ben Jenkins on Flickr]
Photo: Quickcam [Ben Jenkins on Flickr]

• MySpace is back up after a weekend power outage. Blogging scenesters and desperate viral marketers of the world return to work.
• Technorati celebrates birthday #3 with a fresh look and a portal page, making the blog search service finally user-friendly.
• Wal-Mart's insultingly sleazy social network, "The Hub" (skewered by a video blog last week), still sucks. Ad Age explains why. [AdAge]

Technorati is a robust blog search engine with the largest user base in its industry. Those users are served an array of text and graphic ads, often matched to search terms. It seems like a perfect recipe for revenue.

But just last week, the company took a $7.6 million round of funding that likely makes the VCs its majority shareholders. This is something a desperate startup does, not a healthy one with profit and growth potential. Why sell control for a quick shot of capital?

Remember that when a company sells, the investors get paid first. And now the VCs will take over half that money. So even if CEO Dave Sifry is willing to give up control, he's probably not crazy about carving away at his founder's share.

But this shouldn't happen! If anyone should have sold for millions, years ago, it's Technorati! Valleywag's still digging for answers. If you want to help, tip tips@valleywag.com. Your anonymity will be protected.

Earlier: Technorati belongs to the VCs now

The money came from the same venture capital firms that gave Technorati $6.5 million at a valuation of $12 million in 2004. So back then, Technorati sold a third of the company.

Before that, it took angel investments. We can guess those investors own another sixth of Technorati. So when it asked for its Series C money, Technorati only had half the company left to sell. An industry expert says that the company must be low on cash, because with this round, the founders have basically given up control.

Last year, founder Dave Sifry said that funding announcements are like "proclaiming your latest levels of debt," according to ex-Technorati developer Niall Kennedy. No wonder Dave doesn't mention the funding in his blog — he's practically maxed out his platinum card.

Random Ramblings [PE Week Wire]
Technorati raises $7.6 million series C [Niall Kennedy]

• What will happen now that the Skype protocol has been cracked. Especially since the VoIP service is already free. [Techmeme]
• What blog-tracking service Technorati will do with its new $7.6 million in capital. [Techmeme]
• Whether it's dumb, or really dumb, not to rename your small business when it's called AdSense. [Techmeme]

• FrieNDA: A non-disclosure agreement between pals, used for good news ("Google made me VP!") and too-hot gossip.
• Crowdserfing: The more economically accurate term for "crowdsourcing."
• lol factor: The earmark of when a blog search tool adds MySpace blogs to its index. A graph of posts using "lol" over time shows when Technorati took MySpace in and out of its database.

• Yahoo didn't buy Technorati. Sorry, Flipmeat Trifecta players. [ZDNet]
• The SF Chronicle confirmed that hey, some of these Valley guys are pulling in rather a lot of money. [SF Chron]
• A woman called Steve Jobs hot. She just wanted him for his big...cube. [Wired News]
• Someone on Curbed noticed the new Apple New York store looks a lot like the Louvre. (Except if the Louvre burned, there'd be less looting.) [Curbed]
• And among the many videos of the Apple store opening, this is the juiciest — with the best Steve cameo. [YouTube]

• Lloyd Braun comes out swinging today with what the NY Times calls "the most extensive of his initiatives to get final approval:" Yahoo Tech. The top-story panel is sometimes overlaid with an interstitial ad. Should've stuck with puppet-anchored news, Lloyd. [Yahoo Tech and NYT]
• By accusing Microsoft of playing dirty by making MSN the default search tool for Internet Explorer, Google's Marissa Mayer takes a stand against default search engines in browsers. Oh, don't worry, Google's still the Firefox default. Let's clarify: Google's Marissa Mayer takes a stand against default search engines other than Google in browsers. [NY Times]
• Dave Sifry of blog index Technorati reminds everyone that the blogosphere doubles every 5 5.5 6 months (it doesn't). [Sifry's Alerts]
• Napster now offers free songs, five plays each, supported by ads. Bittorrent, IRC, Soulseek, Usenet, and LimeWire continue to offer free songs, infinite plays each, supported by RIAA lawsuits. [CNET]
• Bill Gates is still $3 billion poorer one weekend after a Microsoft stock drop. [MSFT on Google Finance]
• A shame. With that $3 bil, maybe he could've bought Vonage. [Financial Times]

• VIP-club roll-outs: Facebook was nearing its saturation point. The social site had 85% of college students on its roster, but the million-dollars-a-week revenue didn't matter if Facebook didn't grab more, more, more. So it expanded to companies yesterday, using an old trick from its first college-listing days: delayed roll-outs. For now, employees from only 10 companies and 1 non-profit can snag corporate Facebook profiles.

  The cool kids at Apple, Intel, EA, Amazon, Intuit, and Microsoft (and a few non-tech corps) can get past the velvet rope; Googlers and Yahoos are left in the cold until the next round. Now whenever Facebook needs a numbers boost, they can pop another Fortune 500 company onto the list. [Inside Facebook]

• We are the world: Dave Sifry's Technorati really is growing — the blog search index is doubling every 6 months (wait, wasn't it every 5.5 months two months ago?).

  But that story's not sexy enough for his fans and investors. The VCs want a grand metanarrative, they want to be part of something big, where they were in on the ground floor, they were pre-Singularity, man. And Sifry gives them that: "I continue to marvel at it, but the blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace."

  Not exactly, Dave. Just because you finally added MySpace to the Technorati index doesn't mean the blogosphere doubled — it means you stopped ignoring it. And some day, Technorati will run out of massive blog indices to discover. Hopefully for Dave, it'll be after his IPO. [State of the Blogosphere]

• Crank out the pageviews: Kids! News Corp. is cool! Honest! Look how influential and huge we are at MySpace, with our pageviews approaching Google!

  

  Pardon? 10 cents for a thousand pageviews? A flood of useless clicks every time you visit — log on, log on again, refresh so it works, click twice to enlarge, click three times to rearrange friends? Faking traffic to seem bigger than Google? NEVER YOU MIND THAT. [Mike Industries]

But they pretty much confirm the story — and based on report after report, this is no rumor.

For more news, read, um, Technorati. (Unless you're in China, in which case, why isn't Gawker Media blocked yet?)

China blocks Technorati [Tom Raftery's IT Views]

After the jump, Richard's copy-and-paste-heavy exit e-mail.

Earlier: So long and thanks for all the equity: Richard Ault leaves Technorati for Metroblogging [Valleywag]

From: Richard Ault [mailto:redacted]
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2006 5:22 PM
To: Richard Ault
Subject: Metroblogging!
Friends and colleagues, I hope this note finds you well and in good spirits. Allow me to apologize in advance for the mass distribution, I hope to have the chance to speak with each of you individually as soon as possible.

In the midst of trying to stay dry in San Francisco, I'm happy to announce that I'm changing jobs. After ten plus years of working on some of the most exciting companies the web has known; CNET, snap!, BuyDirect, myplay, Napster and Technorati. Today I'm adding Metroblogging to this esteemed list!

Working in partnership with Jason Defillippo and Sean Bonner, we aim to make Metroblogging a vital part your everyday lives.

And in case you don't know what Metroblogging is, it's the largest and fastest growing network of city-specific blogs on the Web (45 Cities). From San Francisco to Bangkok, Karachi to Toronto, Metblogs are a hyper-local look at what's going on in the great cities of the world.

http://www.metroblogging.com

I hope you can join us in our efforts to make Metroblogging a success for everyone. Visit your home city, revisit a favorite city or the one you grew up in. And let us know your thoughts on what we are doing. Lastly, if you want to do business with Metroblogging, please don't hesitate to reach out to me.
Cheers,
RIchard

Richard Ault