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Based on this investment, Technorati is now valuated at over $35 million. The company is rumored to be planning to raised additional funding through commercial debt. Technorati redesigned their website recently.

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra said that this round of funding will help get them to profitability. Technorati receives about 25 million monthly unique visitors and provides advertisements to about 450 websites including social networks and blogs.

“We’ve been moving large portions of blogs during the past two weeks and still have a lot to go. The large scale shift has put some strain on our crawl queues and data management systems during this wave of updates,” stated Dorion Carroll, VP of Engineering at Technorati.  “The big push has resulted in slower times to index than usual. We’re working hard to keep the new posts coming in and expect the majority of the backlog to be sorted out during this next week. We appreciate your patience. I think you’ll like the results when everything is converted.”

Technorati uses tags that are linked to blog posts.  Technorati claims that they index about 27.7 million blogs.  ReadWriteWeb points out that Technorati has been receiving some attention for their inability to crawl and index blogs efficiently.  ReadWriteWeb also pointed out that their blog had not been indexed in 23 hours even though they published 10 posts.

No other information has been posted about what features the new Technorati search engine will have.  When the new Technorati is released, check back here.

Technorati has raised over $30 million thus far and is now getting in the acquisition spirit. Technorati has acquired Blogcritics.org. Blogcritics.org is a blog network that started about 6 years ago. BlogCritics is a network of knowledgeable blog writers that publish stories regarding specific subjects. Over the course of the past 6 years, about 2,300 authors published 73,000 articles according to TechCrunch.

Technorati plans on integrating BlogCritics into their Media division. Below is an excerpt from Richard Jalichandra on the Technorati blog. Jalichandra is the President and CEO of Technorati.

What’s in it for us? Blogcritics brings us closer to an open community of bloggers and the audience that follows them. It also gives us a lot more advertising inventory. What’s in it for them? Our combined resources will help that community grow and expose their work to an even wider audience. We’ll also work more closely with Blogcritics authors so they can monetize their own blogs. What’s in it for our advertisers? They’ll be able to run more fully integrated programs across the site and its related blogs.

Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry. BlogCritics was founded by Eric Olsen and Philip Win. Both will be joining Technorati in San Francisco, Calif.

Related Links:
1. blogcritics.org
2. Technorati
3. TechCrunch
4. Technorati Blog

Technorati Media will be officially launching at 9AM Pacific Time today.  Technorati has tested the new service on BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, NerdApproved, and GeekAlerts.  Some of Technorati Media’s customers include Microsoft, Sun, Sony, Visa, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal, Fox, Best Buy, etc.

Currently Technorati Media will only be open to the large blogs, but they will be open to the smaller ones in 3 months or so.  Tony Pribyl was hired on recently as the VP of Sales for Technorati and Jennifer McLean is Technorati’s new marketing lead.  McLean came from Glam. 

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media by Michael Arrington

 

Sifry launched Technorati in 2002.  The name, Technorati is based on the fusion of the words technology and literati (intellectuals).  Technorati allows users to search for blogs, photos, and other media.  Technorati redesigned their platform in 2007 to gain the attention of bloggers, Internet startups, entrepreneurs, and mainstream media.

In the first three rounds of investment, Technorati brought in $21.6 million.  Today the company announced that they have raised $7.5 million out of a targeted $10 million Series D round.  Montgomery & Co. is working on brokering an acquisition of the blog search engine company.

Previous investors in Technorati include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, August Capital, and Mobius Venture Capital.  In this round, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation participated.

Upon visiting the Technorati homepage I noticed that at the top it says, “what’s percolating in blogs now.”  The frontpage consists of stories in the media that many blogs are commenting on and linking to.  This approach is very similar to Techmeme and Digg.

Technorati has a feature called Authority and Ranks individual blogs.  The more a blog gets linked to, the more authority and ranking it receives. The top 100 blogs on Technorati are available at: http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/.

Technorati will be making an official announcement next week about the funding and will be announcing a business strategy initiative.  Look for additional Technorati news next week.

Information Sources:
[1] paidContent: More Cash For Technorati: Blog Searcher Gets $7.5 Million Of $10 Million Fourth Round by Joseph Weisenthal
[2] TechCrunch: Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming by Michael Arrington

The concept seems to be similar to Digg Spy’s idea where stories getting dugg, commented on, buried, or submitted are popped at the top of the list in real-time.  Technorati Topics displays blogs that are linked to recently popping at the top in real-time.  And Technorati tracks millions of blogs.

Technorati does a good job of filtering blog story types under Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business and Life categories, but I believe the user interface could use a little tweaking.  First is the speed at which things pop up should be controllable by the user.  Another problem seems to be with the story pop-up pause function.  It does not stand out:

Notice the text, “mouse over to pause?”  The instructions should be more specific about how to pause the stories from popping up. 

Another problem is that interesting stories are constantly showing up in Technorati Topics, but if you aren’t constantly watching the web site, you may miss out.  I’m wondering how will Technorati Topics cater to those who feel like they’re missing out on the important stuff and do not have as much time to spend on the Internet as others.  If you think about the concept of DVR, perhaps Technorati could provide a similar feature where users can log in and see the recent activity based on the tags they want specifically. 

On the positive side, I would have to say that some of the stories that appear on Technorati Topics seem to be more interesting than Digg.  Why?  Stories popping up aren’t being controlled by a limited community of users.  Stories appearing at the top tend to have a higher Authority, an algorithm Technorati uses to determine which blogs are credible and are often linked to. 

This is a good move for Technorati as it shows once again that their primary focus is on bloggers.  Personally, I hope to see Technorati Topics’ continuously improving.

Eight staff members are also being let go. “At some point this year, the site turned into an aggregator of best videos, music, books and movies. It looked overwhelming, with nothing but pictures and tags on the front page. Another strange thing that happened was the release of WTF (Where is The Fire?). This feature is basically a Digg clone, letting users vote on stories. Why this was needed on top of automated popularity ranking is a mystery,” wrote Alex Iskold of Read/WriteWeb.  I agree with Iskold on this one.  Technorati had the potential to take on Google’s Blog Search unit, but decided to go with a broader market rather than a niche search through its music/video crawlers and WTF product.  Personally, I would have loved to see Technorati focus on a specific niche: Blog searching excluding music and videos.

Is Technorati dead yet?  Not quite.  The company is still in the top 300 on Alexa and tracks websites linking to blogs very well, but the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a very established advertising base depending on Technorati.  But, by judging the amount of money that is being plugged into acquiring advertising companies these days by Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google, I would not be surprised if Technorati stays alive via advertising.  However, it may take more than a potential Technorati Facebook application (if or when it comes out) to keep me impressed.

With $12 million+ funding in the bank, I want to see Technorati take Web 2.0 blog search to a level of heights that we have not seen before.  Good luck Technorati, I wish you success and nothing less.  Good luck in finding a new CEO and I’m interested in also seeing how Technorati makes its next few moves.

Technorati recently cashed in on a $11.52 million third round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture.  By diluting itself into other areas of search, there is a concern about whether the company becomes less attractive for an acquisition from a big media company.

According to the Red Herring report, “twenty percent of Technorati visitors in April went on to visit photo-sharing site Flickr after finding links on Technorati, according to Hitwise.”  Other places that visitors landed in by using Technorati’s search include YouTube, MySpace, and Last.FM.

Earlier this month, Technorati introduced Authority which displays how many blogs have linked to a particular blog within 6 months.  The more incoming links, the more authority that particular blog has and they can show this off with the Technorati Authority Widget.

“There’s no question that Technorati is at the center of a lot of interesting phenomenon happening on the web right now, but it’s hard to understand how it works as a stand alone business,” stated Barry Parr, a Research Analyst at Jupiter.