Three questions keep dogging me: 1. How is it going to make money? 2. How will it survive, once Google, Microsoft or whoever decides to rip them off? They will, you know they will. 3. The first two questions being so obvious, I’m assuming there’s something in their biz plan they’re not telling us. Some trick they’ve got up their sleeve that they don’t want their competition to find out about (for very good reasons). What could it be?

In answer to number 1, well many things were suggested from advertising, to subscription services, to specialized queries and reports for companies and products. Most companies attending agreed that they would be interested in seeing live trend information relating their products to their competitors (a bit like the Book Reviews section)

To number 2, I expect one of the large reasons they will survive past Google or Microsoft implementing something similar is that 80% of the blogs on Technorati ping them directly. That means it is extremely up to the date. Googlebot scans an awful lot of pages, but Technorati gets their quicker after a new post, and unless Google and Microsoft implement the same ping technique and convince everybody to add another site to their ping list I think they will have a hard time competing with that.

And to the last question, they were very open at the salon, and answered everything we asked in detail. As far as I can tell, they are relying on a) holding the market share on their niche and b) having very open practices such that developers will build things for them. Technorati’s API currently is much more versatile in many ways than Google’s, and they pretty much allow free, open use by anybody. This has already spurred quite a few projects with Technorati integration. Beyond that, the links you find on Technorati for a blog are often a bit more relevant than seeing “1-20 out of 10,200″ results. Yes, that can be filtered down to more accuracy but not without more work than you’d have to put into Technorati.