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...