I've long held that from the outside, Technorati looks like a good acquisition target for Yahoo! because it matches a lot of the criteria they've used in the past and a simple implementation of contextual advertising could be what the doctor ordered. Though I can speak only for myself, but I'd say that one of the big reasons that Technorati's widgets don't litter the web is because there's no back end from the results. Sure, Google hasn't offered an embeddable blogsearch and you're just left with their plain vanilla service, but if you use it or their "search within this site" functionality, the possibility does exist for you to monetize the results with AdSense.
Of course, Yahoo! is also in the business of contextual ads, plus their blogsearch tool was only available for a while and then it disappeared, or at least I can no longer find it. Nonetheless, it wouldn't take much for them to marry advertising to the Technorati widgets, but they have their own problems at this time and though I still think they should consider the purchase, if somebody were to ask me the solution to Yahoo!'s woes, the acquisition of Technorati would be the somewhere around third on my list.
It's still a good idea and the price is obviously ticking down, but since Mr. Sifrey made his announcement another scenario has popped into my head and because they aren't plagued by an infernal internal memo, it may actually be a more realistic option.
Tim Faulkner of Valleywag recently illustrated via a simple chart that Amazon has gotten over their shock from the bubble burst and that they've restarted making acquisitions over the past couple of years.
At first glance, Technorati may not look like a good purchase for Amazon, but if you stop and think about it for a while, it could make sense. Most people blog about things that are sold via the Amazon site or which could be easily tied to a product line.
The Technorati results served on their own pages could have advertising for Amazon products alongside. Say you search on the tag "Obama", they could easily put a selection of books about the presidential candidate and politics on the results page. The same can be done for music, appliances, psychological problems, etc. and because Amazon already has the ability to match products to keywords through their Omakase Links, it wouldn't take much to tweak the software to service all of the pages within Technorati.
Also, when one "claims their blog" within Technorati, they could easily be offered registration as an Amazon Associate and beyond the normal tools which we all think of in relation to advertising Amazon products, their inline product previews are really simple to install and can be set so that Amazon decides which words get the double underline, if one chooses. All it'd take from the blogger's side is a single reference to an external javascript. Nothing could be simpler and because most people already link to Amazon anyway, by actively recruiting associates, automating links and drawing attention to their services, Amazon would benefit.
Of course very few people actually make a living from being an Amazon Associate, but with or without Technorati, the opportunity is there. What an acquisition would do for Mr. Bezos and his corporation is that it would dramatically increase their footprint in the blogosphere and though the bloggers themselves may not make the majority of sales, Amazon benefits because it would increase awareness of their many product lines and sales could still happen the conventional way, or after the cookie has timed-out.
I'd say that it'd be dependent on price and Yahoo! may look like the more logical partner, but if Amazon is looking to make additional purchases in this calendar year, I'd suggest that they take a look at Technorati. As a blogger and as someone who reads a lot of blogs, I consider Technorati unparalleled when everything is working correctly. It'd be a shame for it to simply disappear, or for yet another sector to simply be ceded to Google and their growing dominance of the web.