Disgusted
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...
Comments
Knowing full-well that I don't have more than 1% knowledge of what you're looking for, does http://www.weblogs.com/ help at all?
Posted by: Tengrrl | October 31, 2006 09:11 AM
Well, thats the system we used before the feedmesh, it suffered from spam too. I'm joining the lists to get more info on how bad the problem is here.
Posted by: SubWolf | October 31, 2006 02:15 PM
SubWolf: What about going to Ping-o-Matic?
Posted by: Geof F. Morris | November 2, 2006 12:20 PM
Why not find a way to deal with LJ blogs and their friending process?
Posted by: michelle h. | November 11, 2006 07:09 PM
Don't be disgusted! I just got here (smile). During some research, I came across your service in newsfeed. (Don't ask, I don't remember which one.) I know, it's good to hang on to this kind of info for others' sakes.
This whole experience looks marvelous to me and I am happy you didn't give up before I came on board. I just think it's a rough spot and we (blogshares) will get over the hump.
As for technical difficulties, I am not a techi and run into obstacles all the time. However, I just turn off my computer and do something else and then come back to it for we know that this is the future and we can't stop it but we can take a few hours vacation (even meditation).
Well, take a deep breath and we will still be around. Glad I found you. Through this process, I'll learn a lot about the market (even though we are "a fantasy" which I can see may become real).
Blessings,
Posted by: Sophia | November 16, 2006 06:27 PM