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Technorati released the first installment of its 2009 State of the Blogosphere report today – the rest will follow over the course of this week. Last week CEO Richard Jalichandra showed highlights from the report at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.

We posted the full powerpoint presentation from that talk. And now we have the 47 minute video of his presentation as well.

The video is below, along with the original powerpoint presentation:

Technorati SOTB 2009 –

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Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, fresh off a new funding and site relaunch, is showing some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report today at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.

We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below.

Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.

72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.

2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.

Lots more detail in the full presentation, below. You can see the audience reaction on Twitter here.

Technorati SOTB 2009 –

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Technorati relaunched its site tonight, changing and adding key features. Most notable is an expanded and fresher top 100 blogs list, and a new feature that lets authors post their content directly to the site.

In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times. Here’s the first. And the second. The last change, made under the direction of incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra, has stayed more or less constant since then.

In the meantime, Technorati has focused on expanding it’s business in other areas, particularly in handling advertising for other sites. Today, only a small percentage of Technorati’s total network traffic of 25 million U.S. unique visitors per month actually visit Technorati.com.

But that doesn’t mean the flagship site isn’t an important asset. And those of us blogging for more than a couple of years can remember the days when Technorati was a key blogging tool, providing, among other things, a high quality real time search engine back when Google only indexed most blogs every few weeks.

Today Technorati still provides a great blog search engine and keeps what many call the definitive Top 100 list of blogs. With the new site, they are focusing more on direct Technorati content (more on that below), and properly categorizing the more popular blogs.

Go check it out yourself, and here’s a rundown of the new features:

Top 100 Blogs:

Top 100 Blogs: Until today, the top 100 blogs were determined based on unique links from other blogs during the previous six months. The top list was fairly static. Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.” The result, says the company, is a lot more volatility in the lists as blogs surge up and down.

Technorati is also categorizing blogs among a variety of topics, and providing separate lists of top blogs for each topic. Here’s Business, for example, and Gadgets.

Publish Directly To Technorati:

Authors can now choose to publish content directly to Technorati to gain exposure to a wider audience. This content is highlighted on the top of the Technorati.com home page. For bloggers with a big audience this won’t be attractive. But if I was just starting out with blogging, I’d post some of my content here to gain exposure, and then cross post to my own blog. Each writer has a profile with links to their site and content they’ve written on Technorati.

Search:

Technorati is changing search to give much more weight towards authority and relevance over recency. For highly queried terms like “iPhone,” this cuts out a lot of noise and helps people find quality/definitive content more quickly. Users can also choose to search for blogs relevant to the query or posts elevant to the query, depending on what they are looking for.

Topical Content:

Technorati still shows outside content on a topical basis, too. The light green navigation bar at the top has topics like “Technology” and “Sports.” Content shown on that channel includes stuff directly written on Technorati as well as posts from blogs with high authority for the topic.

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Blog search engine (and more recently blog/social network advertising network) Technorati has raised a new round of financing – $2 million from existing investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital.

This is, the company says, an extension of their Series D round from June 2008, where they raised $7.5 million at a roughly $35 million valuation. The company has raise a total of just over $32 million to date (much of that at a much higher valuation).

The company is also in the process of raising additional capital via commercial debt, we’ve heard separately but haven’t confirmed.

This funding should get the company to profitability, says CEO Richard Jalichandra. He won’t say what revenues are, except that it has more than doubled each of the last two years. He also points out that Technorati’s network, with 25 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, is now the 5th largest social media property on the Internet.

In addition to its flagship site, Technorati supplies advertising to 450 or so websites – about half blogs, half niche social networks.

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As we reported earlier today, media search engine Technorati has succumbed to the Twitter infatuation and is launching Twittorati, a site that shows what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about. Our earlier story indicates that the site is launching tomorrow but perhaps our post sped things up. We had a chance to demo the site with Technorati’s CEO Richard Jalichandra. The site pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, which is determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking (its equivalent to Google Page Rank). Authority Ranking is calculated via algorithm of inbound links from other blog posts, and weights those based on timing, relevancy and the inbound link’s site source Authority Ranking.

The blogs that are ranked vary by subject, with The Huffington Post taking the top spot, TechCrunch as no. 2 and Engadget in the no. 3. Twittorati pulls Tweets into a real-time stream (though not fully real-time; like Twitter, you still need to refresh the page to get real-time results) where you can organize Tweets by Authority Ranking or by latest Tweet. Because the Tweets are aggregated from blogs that cover a variety of subject relating to politics, technology, entertainment and more, the subjects of the Tweets are varied and somewhat random. But you can narrow your stream by filtering Tweets by Technorati Tags (life, news, music, politics, etc.) and the top trending Twitter hashtags. For example, some of the top Twitter hashtags that bloggers were Tweeting included #michaelphelps and #MJ. The origins of the Tweets include a blog’s Tweets and bloggers’ personal Tweets from their own accounts. Technorati says it has collected Twitter handles for most of the authors of the top 100 sites.

The site also shows the most popular links that bloggers link to as well as the most popular photos that are linked to. Both link and photo searches can be filtered by most recent links and images. And each day Twittorati pulls in a list of Tweets of featured bloggers that are profiled on the site.

The site itself can be useful when trying to peer into the professional and personal lives of bloggers. I think something that’s missing a breakdown of Tweets from blogs by topic. So for example, if you only wanted to see Tweets from bloggers at technology blogs, there’s no easy way to filter Tweets and blogs by subject. Jalichandra says Twittorati plans to add this functionality in the near future. The site is similar in theory to Federated Media’s ExecTweets, which is focused more on aggregating Tweets from execs in various industries vs. the blogger-focus on Twtterati. WeFollow is also similar, but isn’t limited to just blogs. Missing from the Twittorati are bloggers whose blogs may not make Technorati’s top 100 list, but whose Tweets are relevant and entertaining. Jalichandra says that the site will expand to include other prolific bloggers down the line.

Twittorati is being produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of fellow Twitter aggregatorsMuckrack.com and VentureMaven. Luxury car manufacturer Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati. Technorati Media has been through a roller coaster of highs and lows over the past year. Last June, the company launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network. Prior to launching the ad network, Technorati raised $7.3 million in a fourth round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation. And last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network. And most recently, Technorati launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics and redesigned BlogCritics, a blog network the company acquired.

Unfortunately, Technorati hasn’t been immune to layoffs during the current economic climate. In April, the company let go 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees, and also suffered through an earlier round of layoffs last September and implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. Despite these setbacks, Jalichandra remains optimistic about the future of Technorati and the potential of Twitterati to be a popular destination to peek into the Twittersphere of the blogosphere.

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Technorati has fully redesigned Blogcritics, a seven-year old blog network that the media company acquired last August, in an effort to drive more traffic to the site. We originally wrote about Blogcritics in 2005. Blogcritics currently is a community of 3,300 writers who have published more than 84,000 articles, providing bloggers an entry point to publish their content to a more widely-visited site. The content on the site hasn’t changed much; it’s will simply be packaged in a sleeker, more user-friendly interface. Currently, the site’s design and interface is bland and features very little in terms of images.

The new design, which will be rolled out at 1 AM PST tonight, features a new logo, a more colorful interface, and is well-organized. The site contains a new feature “ObamaNation,” that will analyze the impact President Obama is having on pop culture. It also allows users to follow their favorite writers by listing all of the content a writer has created both on and off the Blogcritics platform. All in all, it is a big improvement in terms of the way the site looks and feels.

Blogcritics, which is similar to Salon’s Open Salon, draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors, according to Google Analytics. The site hasn’t increased traffic since its acquisition last summer—the site had about 1 million monthly uniques at that point as well, so this is clearly an effort to spruce up the blog community to drive more traffic. The site currently runs ads completely through Technorati’s ad network.

Technorati Media has been through several acquisitions and redefining changes under CEO Richard Jalichandra, who joined the company in October 2007. Last June, the company launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network. Prior to launching the ad network, Technorati raised $7.3 million in a fourth round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation.

Last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network. And most recently, Technorati launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics.

Unfortunately, Technorati hasn’t been immune to layoffs during the current economic climate. A few weeks ago, the company let go 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees, and also suffered through an earlier round of layoffs last September and also implemented pay cuts for remaining staff.

But Jalichandra told us that that the blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Jalichandra has also said that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible.

Here’s a look at the old homepage:

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