Today, we've announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org . If you're a blogger, you might be familiar with them )and they've been part of the Technorati Media network since June(. If you're not, Blogcritics is an online community of thousands of bloggers, and an award winning site. They're publishing everything from music reviews to articles on politics and technology â€" to a monthly audience of more than a million. Why did we do it?

We're committed to improving our search results and the overall user experience and are taking steps to reduce the amount of spam and non-blog entries that make it into the Technorati index. We've made some improvements in how we identify legitimate blogs in order to filter out the spam. What was the problem? Large volumes of splogs )spam blogs( and non-blogs ping us in ever increasing numbers. While only a small percentage get through our filters,

Technorati is experiencing a problem with our search result updating infrastructure. We continue to crawl and save data, however, post search results are stale and temporarily stuck at about 3pm Pacific Fri. Aug 15. Link results )reactions( are stuck at Thu. Aug 14. We have identified the root cause and are actively working on the issue. We expect to have the system caught up during the evening hours. No data is being lost,

I was in Chicago last week )anyone who knows me knows not to get me started on my former city: the lake, the food, the Cubs'( to participate in ad-tech . If you've never attended, the event is exactly that: a conference for digital marketing. The content and speakers struck me as particularly good this time around, with a major focus on social media.

Technorati is bringing you that much closer to attending Web 2.0 Expo NYC next month â€" we've got free tickets to give away! As a media sponsor for the event, Technorati has complimentary promotional tickets for the conference taking place Sept. 16-19 at the Javits Center in NYC. For your chance to snag a ticket, email WebExNY@technorati.com by August 12, 2008. You'll be entered into the drawing, and notified by August 14. Good luck!

It's been a while â€" â€" we've had our heads down focused on building the business, so we've been a little quiet lately. I wanted to bring things up to date with what's new today as well as fill you in on our core search business. So we're launching an ad network' Why? Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed and to bring audiences to blog content. Given our unique position of running a blog search engine,

We strive to provide a great user experience and that includes fast page load times. Last summer we worked very hard on this effort and for the past many months we have been able to achieve this goal. Well, I'm disappointed that I have to tell you what your probably already know, we have stumbled a bit the past two weeks. Page load times have been on the rise over the last week and, in a couple instances, the site has been nearly unusable.

Nowhere have we seen a bigger impact of blogging and social media on the American political landscape than on the 2008 presidential election. Candidate appearances formerly confined to a small town are uploaded to YouTube and seen by millions. Conversations once shared by small groups spread instantly and globally. Facebook and MySpace are as important as New Hampshire and Iowa. According to Yahoo,

D'Technology Blog posted today So you've installed WordPress 2.5, now you want to show Technorati links on the dashboard. Here's the code... read the rest If you're stuck on an old release because you didn't want to lose those inbound links in the administrative console, you're now free to move up to 2.5. Because the of the widespread hacking of legacy WordPress installations, we strongly urge you to upgrade ASAP.

This is a follow up on our post regarding a problem affecting thousands of WordPress blogs, Patch or Upgrade Your Wordpress Installation, Now . WordPress has since released version 2.5 . However, we've noticed that a large number of blogs remain vulnerable to the security issue addressed by the 2.3.3 release. Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page.

Technorati has seen a number of blogs exploited by a recently announced WordPress vulnerability. The fix for it is simple: upgrade your installation or patch it. If you're running a WordPress installation, please read about the WordPress 2.3.3. release to review your options.

Sorry about the goofy title, I'm in grave need of levity now due to some indexing troubles we had this past week and the ensuing recovery effort. We're currently in the midst of repairing most of the effected data but I wanted to share what's going on with it. Technorati's spiders were shutdown for several hours on Thursday and various intervals since then while we investigated a number of anomalies that were appearing in our data; essentially,

Over the holiday break we found and fixed a bug that inflated authority counts for certain blogs. The blogs affected were those on domains that also have linked-to sub-domains. The links to the sub-domains were erroneously counting toward the blog authority of the blog on the parent domain. Since Technorati Authority is a calculation of how much attention is being paid to a blog and the posts beneath it, we do not include sub-domains.

If you ping Technorati directly via our web form , it reduces the number of moving parts required to process the ping. It also offers a crawl-time advantage to Technorati members who have claimed the URL that they are pinging for; those pings go into a higher priority queue. However, we realize that most bloggers rely on the XML-RPC ping capabilities of their blog content management systems )CMS( and, much of the time, that works just fine. However,

Do you hate having to remember passwords, logging into lots of different services, each with a different password? User-centric identity is a fancy way to describe putting you in control of the logins and passwords required to authenticate your identity on different services; this is an idea that Technorati is fully behind. Technorati launched OpenID support in October 2007 for blog claiming and followed up with identity provider support two months later.

Those who have been following Technorati over the years may remember the basic proposition emblazoned on the web site, What's Happening on the Web Right Now . One of the exciting things about working at Technorati )particularly if you're a data geek like me( is that the web is changing in real time. Searching it in real time and discovering the significant happenings realizes the promise of the web to catalyze and connect us.

In a few short years, weblogs have come to represent the fundamental connected conversation of our pubic lives. The numbers involved have become very large: at Technorati we index over 65,000 blog posts an hour along with 2,800 fresh links a minute. Worldwide, we index over 100 million blogs. We built Technorati on blog search, helping bloggers, readers, journalists and brands understand the online conversation on a topic: who's talking, who's influential,

My first two months at Technorati are in the books, and in that time, a number of you have asked me "what is Technorati up to?" or "now that you're on board, what are your plans?" Today, I'm happy to introduce a new Technorati.com that answers both those questions. And it really is new: it leverages the best of Technorati's definitive resources to offer an evolved, discovery-driven experience that is more powerful, more relevant,

Forty-eight hours, a lot of links and a fist full of poker chips later, Blog World Expo 2007 comes to a successful close. I'd like to congratulate Rick Calvert and the entire Blog World crew for putting on a very impressive inaugural event that brought together intrepid bloggers and blog businesses. Technorati was happy to support the cause, and it was great meeting the core users who make our service so relevant.

Heard about the upcoming Blog World Expo ? I hope so, since it's being billed as the world's largest blogging conference and it's happening next week in Vegas! As if any of you actually needed an excuse to go to Sin City midweek, here you go: the globe's biggest meet-up of bloggers, vloggers, podcasteres, broadcasters, producers, media outlets and Web-savvy businesses. What better time and place to network with fellow online publishers, companies, and media folk?