Two indications that the heyday of the “blogosphere” is over this week.

First came the rapid rise and seven figure sale of WallStrip. From an industry perspective this is vlogging’s “Dan Rather” moment. I expect a lot of heat around vlogs in the next few months. DIY Internet media always proceeds from easiest to produce/lowest bandwidth text based stuff, up through harder to produce bandwidth hogs. Its time for strong, semi-pro vlogs to climb up into the mainstream the way political blogs did a few years ago.

Second comes today’s Technorati redesign. Technorati founder Dave Sifry writes:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we’re using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.

Technorati made itself the arbiter of success in the blogosphere by inventing a kind of blog economy where links were the currency. But the company’s own research showed the growth of blogs slowing and new kinds of metainformation (like tags) replacing links in the value chain.

Steve Rubel’s experience summarizes the situation nicely:

…I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007.

At the heart of the new Technorati is the goal of truly live search of the live Web across all its platforms (text, audio, video) and all it’s meta-information sources (keywords, tags, directories), a universal search that goes head to head with Google’s strategy, a losing proposition to Rubel who says “the heyday of dedicated “live web” search engines like Technorati is coming to a close.”

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reads the redesign similarly:

This is also a clear move by Technorati away from blog search, although many of the media search features have been around for a while. It may be an acknowledgment that they can’t beat Google Blogsearch over the long run, or it may be a strategy to go after a larger potential market for time sensitive content. Or both….

All signs are that Technorati is continuing to look for a replacement to Sifry, the founding CEO, and rumors that the company is looking for a buyer persist despite denials from the company.

But Robert Scobble kicked the tires at the new Technorati and was impressed:

Technorati does “Live” search MUCH MUCH better than Microsoft and even better than Google’s Blog Search.

I predict that, with this update, Technorati will become a quick takeover target. If I were at Microsoft I’d be spending a few corporate hours wining and dining Dave Sifry.

Technorati is so superior to all the other blog search engines now that it isn’t even funny.

Can’t wait to spend some time with it.