Technorati acquires NEO-based Blogcritics.org

Technorati, a leader in blog search technology announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org -- an online community of some 2,300 bloggers and authors, as well as full-service news and reviews source -- yesterday, Tue 8/26. The award-winning web content outlet, created by Aurora-based Eric Olsen (pictured), offers hundreds of articles every week on everything from politics and entertainment, to sports, news, technology and gossip. The site also provides bloggers with "an entry point to publish their content to a much broader audience than their own blogs afford," according to Technorati's press release on the subject. The two online entities connected at the Blogworld Expo last year, with a business connection getting serious over the last few months. Olsen gave an exclusive interview to Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian late yesterday.

"It's an exciting time for us," Olsen said. "To realize our vision and have the capacity for what we've hoped to accomplish all along is a very positive validation of our method, approach and world view. What impresses me the most going forward is that we both have the same ultimate function in mind -- to enable the blogosphere. Our fuction is to help writers improve their writing and find their audience; Technorati's is almost 180 degrees and complimentary, where they approach things from a purely algorithmical process. They're content agnostic, content neutral... and together we get to focus on our strengths and help each other. They can send us traffic and we become their content source. As part of Technorati, we'll be able to grow our respective communities and further improve our own platform to attract new audiences in the process."

Some 73,000 articles have been published in the six years since Blogcritics launched. The site draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors who generate 3-4 million page views. As to the $1 million purchase price hinted at in this TechCrunch article that broke yesterday, Olsen says the number is "purely speculative... things are much more complicated than that, and more like a merger in some ways, which people will begin to see very soon."

From Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian peterATcoolcleveland.com

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