We’ve had our own share of ups and downs lately with the Blogshares servers, the AboveNet NOC suffered power outages of some sort two mornings in a row, knocking us out and creating a few hours of table checking and fixing in both cases. Finally, we’re back to normal.
Or so we thought. It turns out the PubSub Feedmesh has been offline for the past 24 hours, and we’re worried it may not come back, after warnings a few months ago that they were about to close. This was our primary source of pings for new and recently modified blogs, and it’s disappearance (again) meant it was time to try something else.
Whats our other option? Blo.gs. We’ve been approved to access their Cloud Interface for a few months, so we gave it a try…. after a few minutes, we were forced to turn it off again while we did some hard thinking.
Why? Here’s an example of the quality of pings we were receiving – this is in raw ping format. Looks like about 90% spam, up from the more usual 30 – 50% spam we’d see from PubSub, and quite a bit of it was getting past our fairly decent filters. This is, as far as we’re concerned, a nasty change from what we were quite good at handling, and our time is limited to handle this new torrent of, well, crap.
Some will have noticed we’re still hovering just under 9 million blogs on our count, while Technorati now proudly proclaims to have 55 million. Piffle. Our model is different, however, we remove old/dead blogs from the index, plus our hardware restrictions (no VC funding for this little group, remember) means we have to ignore some legitimate blog groups (LiveJournal) that would otherwise swamp us. I’d say our spam filtering is a little better so far also – at least, it is while we dont use the blo.gs feed.
What to do now…
Monthly Archives: October 2006
New Voting Documentation
In addition to the Blog Demographics changes discussed in the previous entry, the second part of our continuing index improvement has been the release of brand new, much more detailed voting documetation pages a few days ago.
Quoting from the official announcement:
These are a veritable treasure. written by Rantz based on his mentorship with kucinichworldpeace, whose understanding of voting and the Index is virtually unparalleled in the game, and on Rantz’ many months of voting and cleaning the Index followed by many more months of refining, testing, and amplifying his knowledge as he taught it to many players who participated in the Friends of the Index program.
The documents are not just an incredible resource guaranteed to increase your voting accuracy and efficiency, and your karma. They are an historic legacy of two great players.
If you haven’t already done so, please take a look at the new docs. They start here.
Blog Demographics
Several months in the works, today we launched a new top-level industry: Blog Demographics.
Blog Demographics is a top-level industry for which votes cannot be cast. Its sub-industries contain information about Gender, Language, and Place as those pertain to the blog and its blogger(s)
This called for some re-organization. As the description indicates, the Gender, Language and Place industries are now subs to Blog Demographics and likewise non-votable. All the sub-industries of these three, however, are still votable.
We also created several new industries today — several subs of the Gender Industry as well as Hometown Blogs and Communications
And to retool the Artefacts associated with the formerly votable “Language” and “Places”.industries, we created an opportunity for players to participate for a chance to win B$50 billion. Check it out!