David Sifry: Who's Saying What In Blogville

David Sifry is relentless in evangelizing the importance of blogs to business. "You can either choose to listen or choose not to listen," says Sifry, 36, CEO of Technorati, the leading blog search engine. "Either way, people are talking about your company, they're talking about your product, they're talking about your competitors." In August, Sifry will press the point when he rolls out a subscription service for customized searches so users can track buzz about their companies.

But with giants Google (GOOG ), Yahoo! (YHOO ), and MSN (MSFT ) seemingly poised to enter blog search, it's not clear whether Technorati, with its relatively tiny server capacity and name recognition, can compete. Despite big growth in the number of blogs it tracks -- now 13.3 million -- Technorati is slow and erratic, bloggers complain. Sifry attributes that to the ambitious task of tracking both relevance and timeliness. Sifry, a serial entrepreneur, says his goal "is to build something great." Users, he's betting, will follow.

By Dana Goldstein

Related information about Technorati
- Technorati: A New Public Utility
- Technorati's web site