Blogdigger started at around the same time as ReadWriteWeb (we began publishing April 2003) and it was one of the first RSS-based blog search engines. I first corresponded with Greg Gershman around the time we started our respective endeavours. Over the past 5 years Blogdigger has been one of the less high profile blog search companies around - but even so we've often compared it to Technorati and Feedster. In 2005, Blogdigger diversified from blog content to focus more on digital media. At that time it launched a media search product, to extract and index media content from blog content - including audio, video, and images. Blogdigger has also experimented with Groups and Local apps.

This acquisition by Odeo is probably as much about hiring the talent of Gershman than it is about Blogdigger. The acquisition figure isn't being divulged. However Gershman was pretty frank about Blogdigger's fortunes over the past 5 years, admitting that their better funded competition (notably Technorati) have dominated the blog search sector. This sector has also had its high profile failures, it should be noted - Feedster and PubSub among them.

How Blogdigger Has Fared Over 5 Years

I admire the way Blogdigger has diversified through the years and consistently sought out new niches within blog search. The digital media part of its business is what, in the end, differentiated Blogdigger from the crowd. It's worth reading Greg's story in full, below, as it provides an informative glimpse into how a small, unfunded startup has battled through 5 years and finally had a successful conclusion (well, we hope the price paid can be deemed a success). And remember that Blogdigger, like this blog, launched well before the web 2.0 hype began. Here's Greg's story:

"Regarding Blogdigger: as the blog search space grew more crowded, we tried a few different approaches to keep Blogdigger relevant. One was to expand into various other blog search applications, such as media search and local search. Media search really had the most traction, due to some of the search partnerships we had with sites like Webjay and Ourmedia. At our peak we were serving over 100,000 pages a day (not including RSS feeds; our RSS searches have continued to grow over the years, we now service about 400K searches a day). Since those partnerships went away, we've lost a good portion of our traffic, but, strangely, our revenues are about the same, only slightly lower (not in proportion to our traffic decrease). We still have a good number of users (our stats are on Quantcast), and some good partnerships, including powering the search for Jurist, a blog project run out of the University of Pittsburgh's Law School.

We've also licensed to market intelligence and monitoring services, and are hoping to continue to grow this in the future. Due to various factors (some of which were that we never raised any outside funding for the site, also as a differentiator) we moved away from trying to index all the blogs on the web, to making sure that our index was as spam-free and duplicate-free as possible. The goal is that when you look for information, you get good results each time. This has proved beneficial in attracting partners to syndicate our results on their sites, which in turn has helped us build traffic to Blogdigger."

Congratulations Greg and team. And we look forward to the new Odeo, which we will be checking out soon.

"It’s a client for subscribing to, watching and listening to podcasts which can also transcode the content and sync it with a number of portable devices including smartphones," Rupert told Voice Over Times. The ability to sync with a wide range of portable devices was always one of FireAnt's most attractive features. Judging by the screenshot (above), the new Odeo media browser is based directly on the FireAnt software. While it is hard to tell from just a screenshot, to my eyes it looks nearly identical to the last iteration of FireAnt.

The relaunch positions Odeo to compete with companies like Veoh and their VeohTV service and Mefeedia. FireAnt's player has always been very slick, and Odeo still has name recognition as one of the first podcast authorities, so combining the two in the way Odeo plans makes sense. Can Odeo make a comeback? We'll begin to find out next month.