ON NEW PLACES TO SEARCH

IN CYBER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM...

There is a shift in thinking needed when you need the freshest, latest, earliest tidbits of info.  It's no longer the search engines crawling yesterday's static web pages, but the new search services that tap directly into new flows of information from constantly updating blogs.  Let me explain my sudden enthusiasm on some thing that may seem obvious to many. 

As I've noted elsewhere on this site before, I've been a long-time user of web-based feed aggregator Bloglines for my RSS feeds (recently purchased by AskJeeves, which in turn has been purchased by InterActive Corp.).  Up until this dawn, it's been one of the most technically dependable services I use on the web, on par with Yahoo!, which has been around for a decade. 

Other services, such as Google have been dependable as well.  But it matters most when sites that have substantial user personalized information go down, given the amount of personal content that could be lost.  Yahoo! has a lot of users' personal info, from email to calendar data, along with web-based bookmarks and the like.  Services like Bloglines increasingly have user critical info in the form of their web subscription feeds, that would take a fair amount of effort to re-create.  And I have too many feeds on Bloglines to lose, with my last backup of Bloglines files much too long ago.

Well, this morning, for the first time ever, it didn't seem to work.  It wouldn't let me log in, even after multiple attempts.  There was nothing on their front page about any technical troubles.  I sent an email to their customer support folks and then resigned myself to a long wait over the weekend for a response.  The moment reminded me of a phrase from one of my favorite movies (click for larger image).

But then, I wondered if I might not be alone with this problem.  So, I searched the usual suspects with the phrases "Bloglines troubles" and "Bloglines log in".  Got nothing on Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN search and Icerocket search (both the main service, and their new Blog search area).  You can see the Google result here, which was representative of the search engines.

I also searched in the "News" areas of Google and Yahoo! figuring that there might be some press mentions somewhere if there was a system wide problem on Bloglines.  Again, nothing relevant sprung up.

Finally, it occurred to me to search within the Blogstream it self (I dislike the word BlogoSphere, so I'm trying out various new substitutes...Blogstream is my favorite so far).

The first and only place I had to try was Technorati, a pioneer in searching blog feeds.  Bingo on the first try!  There were multiple hits, citing blog entries from all over, with folks having the exact trouble I was...you can see some of the links, here, here, and here. 

Try it your self by typing in "bloglines log in" into technorati...you see a constantly updating stream of posts expressing frustration at not being able to log in.  Technorati calls it "searching the world live web", and you begin to see the reality in the hype.

All of a sudden I know I'm not alone, so I chill.  The point here is not that Bloglines didn't work for me, it's knowing that it didn't work at all.  Kind of like the power outage in Manhattan a few years back, when the lights first went out.  You worried in the first moments whether it was just you, but then relaxed when you realized it was the whole East coast.  Not that you wished it on the whole East coast, but you just wanted to know quickly what was up.  But it was easy to find out...you just poked your head outside, or walked out on the street to find out what was up.

With so much of our daily routines increasingly depending on services online, it's increasingly important to know which window to poke one's head out of to find out what's up.  It's important to realize that there are new stream of information flowing in the forms of blogs, that one can increasingly turn to, through search services that specialize in just that information flow.  The world is changing again...

P.S.:

Bloglines as back up and running by 7:30 PST...here is the note on their web-site:

Bloglines Outage

This morning, one of our user databases suffered a failure that wasn't detected by our monitoring systems. This resulted in the inability of people to log into their Bloglines accounts. The database has been reset and no data was lost. We apologize for the issue and we're looking at ways to ensure this doesn't happen again.           Sat, 16 Apr 2005 07:30:00 PST

Taking no chances, I backed up by Bloglines file by exporting it in OPML/XML format.  I then tried to import it into My Yahoo!'s new RSS feed page.  The importing instructions are straightforward, but gave me an error message saying

ERROR: Please select an OPML file up to 400K in size.

...this is puzzling because my file is only 82kb.

Oh, well...the service is still in beta, so glitches are to be expected...back to the drawing board in finding a reliable web-based alternative to Bloglines...would welcome any thoughts/suggestions on options...to be continued...

Comments

[jax]

your technorati link is duff. hth.

[Michael Parekh]

thanks, my bad...fixed.