Technorati — a blog search engine and many other things depending whom you speak to, and when — has yet another a new direction. Word is Dave Sifry's wandering venture, backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, has taken over Personal Bee, an also-ran news aggregator. The purchase price is only in the six figures; Personal Bee's founder will come in as VP of business development at Technorati; we're not sure whether the value of the target was in engineering, where Technorati's been weak. Any significance beyond that? One person familiar with Personal Bee says Technorati — which has in the past offered brand-tracking to marketers, ego-surfing to bloggers and search to ordinary users — plans now to build themed news pages in the style of Techmeme. Interestingly, while Technorati boasts of tracking more than 50 million blogs, Techmeme polls a select group of tech news sites. It's about time that Technorati focused on the quality of stories it picks up; not just the quantity.

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