The good news just keeps on coming here at Technorati. I'm so excited to let you know that the legendary technology investment pioneer Sanford "Sandy" Robertson has joined our Board of Directors, effective immediately.

I met Sandy in January at the World Economic Forum, where, much to my delight, we formed a fast friendship. The better we got to know one another, the more I became convinced Sandy would be an incredible addition to the Board leadership at Technorati.

Sandy is a principal of Francisco Partners, which is one of the world's largest technology buyout funds. Prior to founding Francisco Partners, Sandy was the founder and chairman of Robertson, Stephens & Co., which most of you will remember was the leading technology investment bank formed in 1978, and sold to BankBoston in 1998. Since then, Sandy has been an active technology investor and advisor to a number of amazing technology companies, and currently serves on the boards of the Democratic Leadership Council, Dolby Laboratories, Inc., Pain Therapeutics, Inc., salesforce.com, Inc., and the Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving

Perhaps most interesting to me, he has had significant financing involvement, including IPOs and secondary financings in more than 500 growth technology companies throughout his career, including 3Com Corporation, America Online, Inc., Applied Materials, Inc., Ascend Communications Inc., Dell Computer Corporation, E*Trade Securities, Inc., Siebel Systems, Inc. and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

I'm really looking forward to learning from Sandy - he immediately struck me with his personal charisma, integrity, deep experience, and insightful business mind. As we continue our growth, Sandy's sage advice and wealth of experience will prove invaluable to our growth and future success. Welcome aboard!

Technorati Tags: board, bod, mentor, sandy, sandyrobertson, technorati

Microsoft just announced Windows Live Writer 1.0 (Beta) Update, the latest version of their WYSIWYG blog publishing tool. Windows Live Writer now has built-in support for Technorati tags.

We
Have
Restored
The power
To all our machines
And are recovering nicely
We thank you for your patience
And we wish you all a very happy holiday
Thanks so much to the best Ops team that I have ever had the privilege to work with

Performancing just released version 1.1 of their Firefox extension. The extension allows any blogger to author posts, retrieve page data, and save bookmarks to social bookmarking sites directly from the Firefox web browser.

Once the extension is installed you can press the F8 key or the status bar icon to view other blogs talking about the current page.

The extension also supports pinging Technorati directly from the blog editing interface so we may index your new post even faster.

NewsGator announced MarsEdit 1.1 today, the latest version of their blog publishing application for Mac OS X. MarsEdit now supports Technorati tags through a special edit pane.

It's now even easier to add new tags to the bottom of your post through the MarsEdit publishing interface.

The latest version of MarsEdit is a universal binary, compatible with Intel and PowerPC hardware environments.

Thanks to all the users who requested Technorati tags as part of their publishing interface!

FeedBurner's FeedFlare service allows feed publishers to add content to the bottom of their syndicated post with more information about their content. Feed publishers may choose to include per-item link counts in every post using the service.

You may view an image of a sample post including the service as well as the FeedFlare configuration screen on FeedBurner's site.

Data is presented as a dynamic image allowing viewable content to change without changing the actual content of the feed. FeedBurner plans to open up their FeedFlare service for use on subscriber blogs in addition to the current feed support.

FeedBurner's Technorati link counts are powered by our cosmos API.

Technorati wants to make it easy for our users and their readers to find the latest information about who is linking to your blog and its individual posts. Now users of LiveJournal, TypePad, and Movable Type can it is as easy as swapping out your default blog templates.

Switching templates will add a link to the Technorati search result for each of your entries. You will also have a "Blogs linking here" link in your sidebar to let your readers search for all references to your blog. On the WordPress platform we have also added a prompt to search Technorati when a search result delivers no results.

Movable Type instructions

1. Download sixapart.zip.
2. Extract sixapart.zip.
3. Replace your default_templates directory with the new content.
4. Go to the Weblog listing screen in the System Overview. Select a weblog and choose "Refresh Template(s)" from the action bar dropdown. All of the templates in that weblog that match default templates will be copied to backups and refreshed with the new code and settings.

WordPress instructions

1. Download wordpress.zip.
2. Extract wordpress.zip
3. Replace the default directory in /wp-content/themes/ with the new content.

David Watanabe just released version 2.1 of Inquisitor, a search extension for Apple's Safari web browser, featuring Technorati search integrated right into your browser search box.

You can even add Technorati as your default search engine! Just click on the image for the configuration gear and change Technorati's shortcut to "return." You may also include Technorati Blog Finder as a search option by adding it from the pre-configured "Blogs" category.

David also built a web version of Inquisitor using AJAX and a similar user interface. You should be able to view the online version using a modern web browser.

Goowy, a Flash-based personal information manager and online desktop, now provides its users with a Technorati search widget for quick and easy access to Technorati's URL, tag, and Blog Finder search direct from Goowy desktop.

Existing Goowy users can add a Technorati widget to their desktop by selecting "Show Technorati" from the "Manage Widgets" option.

We now offer the ability to retrieve the top tags used by an individual blog using the BlogPostTags API call.

Have you ever wanted to create a personalized tag cloud for you and your friends? Now you can! Just let us know the URL of the blog you are interested in and we will return a list of up to 100 top post tags including the total number of posts using each tag.

Christian Stocker felt a sense of nationalist pride last weekend and created a Swiss Technorati Top 100. Christian based his list on a directory of Swiss weblogs maintained by the local community and retrieves information about each blog such as inbound links, sources, and rank on a daily basis. You can read more about Christian's work on his custom Top 100 list on his weblog.

Technorati changed its URL structure for search pages as part of our redesign. If your code references a Technorati search page as a final destination you may want to update your links to provide faster responses for your users.

Search

Technorati's search URLs begin with /search/ followed by your URL-encoded query.

• Whitehouse.gov
• Sifry.com/alerts
• Puppy
• Puppy OR Kitten
• Tour De France

You can also add advanced operators after your search query such as restricting a search to one particular weblog.

• Search sifry.com/alerts for the word "blogosphere"

Technorati still supports the old /cosmos/ links through redirects but it's best to avoid the extra roundtrips and simply link to the final destination in your code.