Update: Dave went nowhere, as he lets us know and he is still the boss at Technorati.
The New York Times discovers Technorati, and writes a generally positive article about the service. Guess, they haven’t used it much, have they? Regardless, buried in the story is this little nugget…“said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-tracking service.”
Last we heard, Dave Sifry was the CEO. Either The Times is wrong or, Sifry has left the building. Technorati management page lists him as the founder/CEO, so it might be just a mistake. Where is Nick Douglas when you need him?
That’s an error. He’s still in charge.
You could always ask him yourself.
E-mail: dsifry AT technorati DOT com
Cell phone: 415 846-0232
Om,
The NYT goofed. Here’s the 3 inaccuracies that I found in the story:
1) It states that Peter Hirshberg is Technorati’s Chief Executive. We really love Peter, but he’s not the CEO, he’s our Chairman. I am the CEO.
2) It states that Edelman “is sponsoring development of new Technorati sites in French, German, Italian, Korean and Chinese, involving an investment of ‘several hundred thousand dollars.'” That is technically correct, but it makes the implication that Edelman has invested in Technorati, which is untrue. A much clearer word choice would have been “payment” rather than “investment” in the aforementioned sentence.
3) It states that there are “more than 55 million of them [blogs] around the world, according to Technorati, and the total is growing by thousands every week.” Again, that’s technically true, but why not be more accurate? There are actually 57.2 million blogs that Technorati is tracking as of the time of the writing of this post, and those numbers are growing by over 175,000 each day, which means that on average, there are at least 1.2 Million blogs created each week. These figures were detailed in my most recent State of the Blogosphere report.
Dave
Good to see you are still in charge Dave.
Louis, I knew the blog post would get Dave’s attention faster than phone call and emails. Trust me, it was intentional. We talk through blogs now.
The New York Times got a technology story wrong? I’m shocked, shocked.
Feel free to call anyway, Om! You have my number 🙂
Dave
FYI – I wrote a post about the lack of customer service and some thoughts on their new video blog here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/technorati-customer-service
And then in my web apps customer service face-off, they initially received a F but I adjusted it after tracking down Liz on her flickr account.
http://www.centernetworks.com/web-apps-customer-service-face-off
Dave – I would love to have a conversation/interview with you sometime about Technorati (I like the service a lot) – I offered this to Liz but received no reply. Feel free to e-mail me at allen at centernetworks.com if you are interested.
The great thing about MSM is that there are fact-checkers and editors and they get the story … ummm … right …
Blogs, on the other hand …
Honestly, the Times may have lost some fact checkers. The killer Yahoo article they ran the other day used old stats from ComScore, excluding visitors under 18 (thus cutting over 20 million visitors) and quoting the agency guy who happens to have MSN.com as the AOR. yech
OK, OK, I just have to do this:
RETURN OF THE SIF!
There’s your gratuitous Star Wars reference for the day (it’s technically wrong, but hey, whatever).