Dave Sifry

Founder of Technorati

• Born: 1968
• Place of Birth: Long Island, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Technorati

Introduction

Founder of Technorati. A vocal member of the open source movement, entrepreneur Dave Sifry moved from Linuxcare—his start-up offering Linux consulting and tech support in order to encourage the adoption of Linux by businesses—to Technorati, which began as a blog search tool and added numerous blogs' worth of content and an innovative advertising platform. At one time in the late 2000s, Technorati was the third-largest social media property, after Facebook and Twitter.

Early Life

David L. Sifry was born in 1968 and grew up on Long Island. An early computer aficionado, he learned to program on the Commodore PET, the first full-featured Commodore computer (1977n}82). He graduated from Oceanside Senior High School in 1986. Determined from a young age to start a computer business, he studied computer science at Johns Hopkins University and received a bachelor of science degree in 1991. In 1996, he set up Secure Remote to sell private networks to large companies. Sifry described the venture as “a horrendous failure.” His early experience in the computer industry, after working for Mitsubishi Electric in Kobe, Japan, included cofounding the Wi-Fi company Sputnik, and in 1998 he founded Linuxcare with Arthur Tyde and Dave LaDuke. Linuxcare offered twenty-four-hour phone support for Linux, a Unix-variant operating system that had grown in popularity in the late 1990s but had faced resistance in being adopted as the operating system for businesses because of the lack of professional technical support—something offered by Apple and Microsoft, for instance.

Life's Work

The Linuxcare concept was to hire and professionalize a class of Linux experts to offer paid on-demand technical support. Dell was enticed to bundle coupons for Linuxcare support with its Red Hat Linux-running desktops. Linuxcare hired a number of high-profile experts, including Rasmus Lerdorf, the developer of PHP, and Martin Pool, one of the developers of Apache.

The company evolved considerably over time, adding four divisions: a research and development division to develop open source software; the professional services division, offering Linux consulting; Linuxcare University, for Linux training; and Linuxcare Labs, which certified hardware systems as Linux-compatible. In addition to offering its own Linux technical support, Linuxcare trained other companies' staffs in Linux issues related to technical support, customer support, and sales matters.

After canceling plans for an initial public offering (IPO), Linuxcare shifted again, shedding most of its staff and focusing on Linux software, which led to the company's renaming in 2004 as Levanta (after its best-selling software package). In 2005, Levanta changed focus again to hardware and gradually declined, going out of business in 2008. The Linuxcare name was purchased by original founder Arthur Tyde, who would later provide cloud computing information technology services under that name.

In the meantime, Sifry had moved on from Linuxcare, founding Technorati in 2002. Technorati began as a search engine for blogs. While blogs and online journals had been around for most of the history of the web—personal blogging began in 1994 with bloggers such as Swarthmore student Justin Hall—the late 1990s saw a spike in the popularity of blogging, which would continue to the present day: Open Diary introduced comment threads to blogs in 1998, and LiveJournal, Diaryland, and Blogger.com all opened the following year. Even in 2002, when Technorati was founded, blogs were by then sufficiently developed and varied that a significant number of political blogs (the political blogosphere) had begun covering political news overlooked by the mainstream media. Talking Points Memo, for example, began shortly after the 2000 U.S. presidential election and was later awarded a George Polk Award in Journalism.

A vast and growing number of blogs made it increasingly difficult to sift through them. The first Internet search engines had been introduced in order to allow users to engage efficiently with the mountains of content on the web, and Technorati saw a niche to fill in offering a tool to allow users better discovery of the breadth of blogs. The name, playing on literati, reflects the belief that blog-reading Internet users were likely among the better-read and better-educated portion of the demographic, although since the time of Technorati's founding, blogs have become mainstream and most Internet users read them. In addition to searching blogs, Technorati rates each blog based on the number of other blogs that have linked to it over the previous six months. Its categorizes search results—and its blog directory—according to the tags bloggers use on their sites. Tag descriptions in recent years have been written by Blogcritics bloggers.

Sifry is an advocate of open source software, as he had been at Linuxcare, and Technorati both uses and contributes to open source software, including a publicly accessible wiki for developers. Since the founding of Technorati.com, Technorati, Inc.—the company behind the search engine—has grown to include Technorati Media, the company's advertising network, and the Blogcritics webzine. Blogcritics was acquired in 2008, its founders made full-time Technorati staffers, and the site was completely redesigned in 2009. More content acquisition followed in 2010, when Technorati acquired SV Moms, the Silicon Valley Moms Group, a network of blogs by women and mothers, which was folded into the new women's channel at Technorati. Again, some of the SV Moms staff were given positions at Technorati.

Every year since 2004, Technorati has issued a “State of the Blogosphere” address, based in large part on an internal survey of bloggers. The “State of the Blogosphere” address has repeatedly drawn criticism; virtually without fail, Technorati's statements about the Blogosphere are challenged by some. The validity of the criticism varies; some merely offer counterexamples in response to Technorati's descriptions of patterns, which can lead to interesting and valuable conversations but does not ultimately disprove the pattern. On other occasions Technorati's facts, or the conclusions drawn from those facts, have been challenged. In particular, Technorati and Sifry are sometimes criticized for being too uncritical about the concept of paid blogging (blogging paid for by brands promoted in those blogs, not ad- or donation-supported blogging). This issue came up after the 2006 address, which heavily promoted Edelman, a widely criticized public relations (PR) agency with which Technorati was working at the time, which had been using fake blogs as a PR tool. There has been a mixed reaction to the 2009 decision to index only English-language blogs, in order to focus on a more or less self-contained segment of the blogosphere. (In 2011, Shani Higgins issued a statement that paid blogging was not stigmatized if it remained transparent.)

Sifry served as CEO of Technorati from its inception until 2007, when he was succeeded by Richard Jalichandra (who was succeeded by Shani Higgins). Sifry became chairman of the board of directors. His time with Technorati ended in 2016 when the company was purchased by technology and services firm Synacor.

Sifry also created Projectdocs, an online collaboration and document management service. In 2008, he launched Hoosgot, a reimagining of Matt Jones and Ben Hammersley's Lazyweb service. Lazyweb had launched in 2002 and was an early web 2.0 initiative, relying on crowd sourcing to answer questions to which users were “too lazy” to find themselves. Spam shut the site down in 2006. Hoosgot took the same concept and integrated it with Twitter, blogging, and RSS/Atom feeds. Sifry installed spam-fighting tools in the hope of avoiding the problems that had sunk Lazyweb, but the project did not last long.

Sifry also spent five years as the founder and CEO of Offbeat Guides, which launched at the end of 2008. Offbeat Guides sells customized travel guides with up-to-date information, based on customers' answers to questions about when they plan to travel, from where they are leaving, and where they will be staying. Sifry sold the company in 2012.

Since leaving Technorati, Sifry fromed his own consultimng company that has done consulting work for many companies, including Zagg Network, MyVillage, and Nurx.

Personal Life

Sifry is a vocal advocate of open source software. He lives in San Francisco and enjoys traveling, especially to Yosemite National Park, London, and Paris. He and his wife, Noriko, have two children, Melody and Noah.

Bibliography

"About Dave." Dave Sifry official website, www.sifry.com/about. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Benedictus, Leo. “Technorati, David L. Sifry.” Guardian. 3 Nov. 2006. Web. 10 Sept. 2012.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Rosenberg, Scott. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

Sifry, Dave. "Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur." Interview. Cleverism, 15 Jan. 2015, www.cleverism.com/dave-sifry-confessions-serial-entrepreneur/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.