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Microsoft or Yahoo? Who will buy Technorati?

January 14, 2006

Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek asks “Who will buy Technorati?

Baker cites Michael Arrington at TechCrunch as to the big three of tagging:

But Flickr and Del.icio.us are not twins. They are tagging triplets along with Technorati, which created and popularized blog tagging in 2005. Today, the majority of blogs use tags and categories to label their posts.

Despite most saying Yahoo, Baker believes it’s going to be Microsoft.

A month ago, I speculated that Microsoft would buy Technorati. My thinking: With Yahoo moving ahead in the community and tagging worlds, Microsoft would hurry to land one of the triplets in an effort to catch up. Granted, this is not sophisticated M&A analysis. Arrington points to a print article in Red Herring that lists 37 signals that Technorati, as well as MeasureMap, Digg, YouTube, could be in the mix this year.

I’ll stick with Microsoft, just to be show that I don’t drift with the tide. One more note. A lot of people expected Technorati founder Dave Sifry to unload the company as it suffered scaling troubles last summer–just as Google was jumping into its market. I for one thought that Technorati’s value and market leadership would ride a downward slope. Instead, Sifry and his team improved Technorati. It’s a lot better than it was then, and I’d imagine, a whole lot more valuable. If he sees a way to continue this progress, perhaps he’s not in such a hurry to sell.

Technorati did right the ship. I thought things were about over last summer when Technorati was having server problems. No more. I am back using Technorati and the buzz around the net has been real positive.

On tagging for the law and professional services businesses, I see good development over the next year. Expect LexBlog to play a role.

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