Technorati celebrated their 3rd birthday yesterday. One of their employees, Niall Kennedy, posted a timeline with a shot of the first building. Nice bars on the window!

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, slow searches or fast, they are still arguably the #1 game in town for blog search today when they are running on all cylinders. When they aren’t, Feedster¹ gains my attention.

A Hmm search reveals Technorati has been mentioned in 109 blog entries (4.1%) to date. They have held up well compared to others: Google (411, 15.5%), Microsoft (396, 14.9%), Yahoo (274, 10.3%), Feedster (38, 1.4%), Pubsub (17, 0.6%) and IceRocket (16, 0.6%).

Pretty impressive considering Google and Yahoo have entered the space, albeit with underwhelming offerings. I’m thinking in 2006 the competition for Technorati from the big boys will be much more pronounced, so it will be curious to see who’s blowing out the candles in 2006. Seems like Google takes a few iterations these days to get their A game going. Personally, I still believe that Technorati was fishing for a buyout but now that the big boys are in town, Technorati has had to step it up. Increased competition and crowding in the space have made their service better. I also like their customer mantra:

We’re redoubling our commitment to our corporate mantra: Be Of Service.

I’m finding Topix to be improving as well, especially now that they are blending blogs with news. As for blog stats tracking, I prefer Blogpulse but it only tracks the top 10,000 blogs. IceRocket deserves a mention when it comes to tagging flexibility, though Technorati is in that game too.

And Technorati recently ripped a page out of the ‘mini’ rage, with their own Technorati Mini which is essentially a small window that checks for what’s new every 60 seconds.

Congratulations to the Technorati crew and I’m sorry I couldn’t deliver our female readers something more enthralling like the real picture of Dave Sifry in his birthday suit (title tease be damned), but maybe somebody with some Photoshop prowess can take that provocative challenge.

(ducks)

Seriously, congratulations Technorati!

1. 12/02/2008 11:01 AM PST: link removed, feedster.com is no longer available. They were a service that aggregated and provided stats on different RSS feeds around the web [↩]

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