Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Technorati Acquires PersonalBee?


source: Mashable.com

We’re still waiting for confirmation from founder Ted Shelton on this one, but I give a fairly good probability to the news today that blog search engine Technorati has acquired PersonalBee, the “news discovery engine” that uses human editors and algorithms to sort through the news, creating a series of niche portals. It’s a similar idea, in fact, to Boxxet.

PersonalBee doesn’t seem to have gained much traction in terms of traffic, visitors and buzz, and there doesn’t seem to be a strong motivation to build your own “beehive” (portal page).

According to Valleywag, which brought the rumor online today, Technorati is interested in spinning out lots of niche news sites - the price is a six figure sum and Shelton would become VP of business development at Technorati. If this is confirmed, it’s certainly a technology/talent buy, since the site’s traction isn’t much to boast about.

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