Technorati has been an icon of the blogosphere since Dave Sifry began the company to track blogs and provide bloggers with statistics and search.  It was the first thing people downloaded to their blogs, and the first part of setting up a blog.  They seem to have lost that celebrity status.  There are so many companies that have been cracking away at that Technorati keystone that it appears they may crumble.  I have been waiting to hear some news from the Technorati camp and it appears that news is bubbling up as reported by TechCrunch.

When I talked with Richard Jalinchandra in Las Vegas at the Blog World Expo in November, he mentioned then that Technorati was in for some changes and that he wanted to lead the company back to its glory days.  He couldn’t talk then about what he was doing but it seems that the cool stuff I expected and the things the head of marketing, Aaron Krane,  talked about on my Social Mediapshere radio show would make them a shining star again.  I didnt expect them to enter the advertising arena.

Tris an I questioned them on why they were not indexing search results past six months and it looks like they may be rethinking that with adding an advertising component to their search.  Arrington states:

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. (emphasis added)

I was hoping that Technorati would be adding some features that would be more than just another way for bloggers to add a revenue component to their blogs.  I want to see them return to an application I would run to five times a day because they offered a way to see stats and a something that was cool to experience as I did back in the day.

This is part of the reason I have hooked my wagon to the folks at Lijit*.  I certainly see that they have ideas to make their “wijit” something that is a first add-on to a blog.  I am not sensing that Technorati has that coolness factor in mind.  I certainly understand that after raising $20M in funding you might want to start thinking of making money and perhaps they will change the way they run their business and we have only seen the beginning of their new glory days.  It appears Richard is doing his job of CEO and is running the company in the best interest of those investors, but I for one want to see them do some things they used to do, only better.  Don’t make it about the page views make it about the blogger and a company that every blogger loves to use.

[photo via Brian Solis]

*Lijit is a client and I do some evangelism for them.