Connecting the dots ...
What’s happening today? TechMeme is stale, showing mostly yesterday’s news. My feed reader is almost empty.
Is everyone sleeping, or at BlogWorld, too busy to write?
Either way, I’m experiencing withdrawal symptoms… and when that happens, I raid the espresso machine and the cookie-box far too often. What a day! 
Is this becoming a weekly ritual? Check your FeedBurner subscriber count: it’s likely down by roughly 40%.
As usual, don’t panic, it simply means that the Google Feedfetcher data (which includes the popular Google Reader) is missing again. In a few hours the good folks at FeedBurner / Google wake up and we’ll have another blog post telling us to wait a day, and everything be back to normal tomorrow – until next time.
Tip to FeedBurner: if this is becoming a routine, don’t bother writing new blog posts. Just remove any reference to specific dates and make it a sticky post.
“A new spam blocker called Defensio is attempting to improve on the standard set by Automattic’s Akismet, the default blocker for WordPress” – reports TechCrunch.
But they are planning to do more than improve… they want to replace Akismet. From Defensio’s FAQ:
And therein lies the rub. Other plugins, like Spam Karma 2 may also outperform Akismet at times, but they don’t replace it; instead, they work together quite well. A status change in either takes effect in the other. Now, I don’t know how good Defensio will be, but it takes a huge leap of faith to give up the proven standard (i.e. Akismet) and replace it with something that may need weeks of learning, as we’re warned by the FAQ. They lost me as an early user right away.
The bigger question here, for software startups: should you start challenging the market leader right at launch, or ride with it, grow as part of the “ecosystem”, then perhaps declare you’re better and no longer need them after you got traction?
Related posts: Weblog Tools Collection…
…and in fact it’s rather enjoyable. Or who knows … it’s easier to try Zoli’s Wine Blog‘s recommendations if you live in Europe. (No relationship other than being namesakes).
Just two weeks ago Technorati was praised left and right for “returning to their roots”: reinstating charts and the authority filter in search. The most telling title: Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts.
Today they are back. To irrelevance. 
When I first noticed I could not find posts older than 6 months, I had doubts if I tested enough, and even if I did, was the issue system-wide, and “by design” or just a glitch. Then I got confirmation from Technorati’s Ian Kallen:
We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice
We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.
First of all, thank you, Ian, for responding so fast. Second, it’s a sad post comment: you just condemned Technorati to irrelevance. Your new CEO says:
The core of everything we do is in blog search – without question, we must do that very, very well
Hm… and the first step to providing quality search is to take the index offline… 6 months is not “remote past”, significant events were reported / analyzed by blogs, often better than mainstream media, and now they are nowhere to be found! Here’s the result of a search I performed for background to my next story: Technorati (0 results) and Google (83 results). I can’t use Technorati if it does not remember “yesterday”… and you don’t even have an ETA on restoring the index.
But the worst part isn’t the poor performance It’s the attitude: silently take it offline, hoping “most people don’t notice“. Yuck. In the age of transparency. I’m afraid Dennis Howlett is right:
@Ian: “We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling” – in other words – we’re totally messed up and are trying to figure out what to do next. That would be closer to the truth don’t you think?
Update: Any hopes of users not noticing are up in smoke: it’s on TechCrunch, TechMeme and a bunch of blogs including hyku | blog, TeleRead, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Deep Jive Interests, Data Mining, WinExtra, Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog, and The Last Podcast.
Jeff Nolan recently discovered that CrispyIdeas, a service the Enterprise Irregulars used for a while (it got spammed after we abandoned it) was acquired by Salesforce.com:
Salesforce.com was the most prominent customer for CrispyIdeas, the service powered IdeaExchange. Not to be overlooked is the Dell IdeaStorm site, which generated more traffic than the Salesforce service even if being less well known.
It appears that Salesforce quietly acquired CrispyNews and has rebranded their offering as Salesforce.com Ideas
A few weeks later TechCrunch reports that Salesforce.com is unleashing their Digg-for-ideas, “Salesforce Ideas”.
Quite a quick turnaround! 
Technorati’s index seems to be rather forgetful: it does not find blog posts older than six months. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s a new “feature”, or it’s always been like this, and I’m just the last person to notice it.
The only time-limit I’m aware of is calculating Authority, which is based on the revolving 6-month link-counts, but I haven’t found any reference in Technorati’s FAQ to the “shelf-life” of posts in their main index. I’ve only done limited testing, but if indeed this is the case, then Technorati is toast. There’s a lot of value in old posts, and the index that finds them is not Technorati, but Google.
If your see your FeedBurner subscriber count cut in half today, don’t panic, it does not means your readers “fired” you. It simply means that Google’s Feedfetcher is not reported in the total count today. Clearly a glitch – not as fun as this other one, when I picked up 50K bonus readers, but hey, I’m sure it will be fixed soon -perhaps by the time you wake up and finish coffee.
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Update: Confirmed: Google Feedfetcher had a hangover.. it’s clearing up now.
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
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