Entries Tagged 'Weblog Services' ↓

FeedShot is a new service for submitting weblogs and RSS feeds to relevant search engines like Bloogz and DayPop.

FeedShot

Ah, I only have very, very low class blogs, or weblogs as we elite folks would rather call them.

Surely if you have a weblog you’ve been getting these emails inviting your to submit your weblog to “High Class Blogs.”

Indeed you may win an “Award!” For what most naïve weblog writer of the week?

Visiting the land of High Class Blogs it looks a bit like a DMOZ for weblogs, a bit like a scraper site and a bit like … er … something ugly.

The reviews by Bruce and crew read as if they were written by robots though I don’t really think that is the case.

My cursory glance didn’t show any signs of High Class Blogs engaged in any practices worse than sending out incompetently formed emails.

But if you remember a couple of years ago there were comment spammers posting some fairly innocent seeming comments with links to innocent seeming sites that would eventually become porn site feeders.

My possibly uncharitable guess is that High Class Blogs is looking to accumulate large collection of inbound links. Once gained they’ll be feeding adult or gambling sites.

I’ve been lucky enough to find some of my sites added to DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory without my request. Certainly I’ve never had a useful or honorable directory ask me to submit.

High Class Blogs: subtle spam, forthcoming scam or just innocent youth without a clue or any aesthetics?

Splog Reporter explains its purpose:

The simplest definition for splog is as follows:

SPAM + BLOG = SPLOG

Splog is a terrorist to our blogosphere and needs to be stopped. This site was created for “good willed” bloggers to report splog in an effort to help to clean up the blogosphere of splog.

Wonderful idea, can’t help but wish them the very best of luck.

Spot Reporter

Chad Everett is such a happy convert to Firefox he’s developing the Bloglines Tooklit for Mozilla.

Inspired by David’s FDSubscriber extension, and his comments about a similar funcitonality for Bloglines, I decided to see if I could do it. In a nutshell? It seems that I can. It took some doing, and there were a number of stumbling blocks along the way (which I’ll share in the future). But I finally managed to create the Bloglines Tooklit for Mozilla.

Extending Mozilla

Having one weblog with ’sex’ within the name and another with those three deadly letters in the path I’ve bitched that weblogs.com won’t accept my pings without my indulging in shenanigans.

For my sexuality weblog, which has the offending, string in its path I ping referencing a subdomain. For the one with s-e-x in the name I often make up whatever name amuses me. Today I was posting a satire of Christian opposition to gay marriage that was rephrased in terms of a defense of circumcision. On a whim I put circumcision as part of the weblog name. Weblogs.com returned “access denied.”

I’m getting ready to simply stop doing the manual pings. Bloglines and many other services send their bot around. If your blogrolling service doesn’t check blo.gs then I guess you’ll have to trust your luck (this might sound arrogant but one of my weblogs is currently receiving 15K unique visitors a day, mostly from search engines but it is reasonably well blogrolled).

In refusing certain sexually themed keywords weblogs.com is playing a losing game. None of the ping spammers I’m aware of them use them. They are too canny. Being smarter than whoever is managing weblogs.com they all hit it repeatedly without ever having their access denied.

Ping-o-Matic! pings ten services to let them know that you’ve updated your weblog. Eventually if you ping Ping-o-Matic! it will in turn notify everybody for you.

Not of huge use as I can see to weblog software like MovableType but handy for folks using Blogger and Live Journal.

Pingo-o-Matic!

Postami, a small news aggregator, RSS feed finder, has added a new service:

Gpmon is an alert management tool used for monitoring website availability and errors. It visualize some informations about your website or blog directly in your GPRS or WAP Phone. Features

Gpmon

Having mentioned popularity I’d feel remiss if I didn’t note my discovery of Feedster’s Top 100.

Ever wonder what feeds are popular with other Feedster-ites? Ever want an easy way to check out some of the feeds that other people swear by? Well we took an anonymous look at the users of myFeedster, our web based aggregator, and calculated the “Feedster Top 100″, the most popular feeds based on the number of subscribers. Here it is along with the RSS feed and an OPML file containing the collection:

The Feedster “Top 100″

Somehow I’d gotten the mistaken impression that Diarist.net was inactive if not defunct. They focus on listing personal online journals and diaries instead of mere links weblogs.

A special series of awards given by web diarists to web diarists, highlighting the best and brightest the genre has to offer.

Anyone who keeps a web journal, diary, or personal weblog is encouraged to participate in The Diarist Awards

The Diarist Awards

This is just speculation, I haven’t emailed anyone at Weblogs.com to confirm my guess.

Twice this morning after posting an entry in my sexuality weblog, Amorous Propensities : sex is funny, MovableType warned me there’d been a problem pinging a site. Checking the log I saw

Ping ‘http://Rpc.Weblogs.Com/Rpc2′ Failed: Ping Error: Access Denied.

I tried pinging manually only to see the same Access Denied.

I shrugged it off as a system quirk that would pass. When my ping was denied a third time it hit me that Dave Winer may be having the same problem with pings from scumbag sex sites that I’ve been having in my referral log.

Performing a manual ping with the weblog title truncated to just Amorous Propensities my ping was accepted.

Wonder how many people have a blacklisted word in their weblog name.

Not that I blame Weblogs.com: the spammers are the ones to blame.