blo.gs. Earlier: April 27, 2006, September 2, 2005, June 14, 2005.
Is anyone who reads
mikel.org still using the blo.gs update service? Since Yahoo! took over I have noticed some strange problems, and I wonder if anyone else has noticed them. First, every so often blo.gs refreshes and the site names with apostophes are rendered incorrectly using escape codes. Also, and more importantly, I see a lot of “ghost” updates, by which I mean a site listed that has not really updated. I know that it happens spontaneously, because it lists my site as having been updated when nothing has changed.
Can anyone shed any light on what’s going on?
More news today
in the wonderful world of weblog infrastructure. One of the best services out there, blo.gs, has been acquired by Yahoo! as of today. The service blo.gs provides has largely been eclipsed by the buzz around RSS, but it’s just as valuable. I like RSS for the quick access it gives you to information from multiple sources, but weblogs aren’t just about the information – and that’s where blo.gs (and BlogTracker before it) come in. Weblogs are a much richer environment than any RSS feed can convey – and only by going to the sites themselves can you really capture that.
Syndication and me.
I’ve been following all the hoo-haw about RSS and Atom and such for a long time now. I have used NetNewsWire at home and Bloglines (here’s my list there: mikel’s blogs). I love that more and more services are offering syndicated content in whatever format. But I also know this: I hate reading weblogs through their feeds.
For me, the words on a website aren’t really distinct from the overall effort that has been put into the site – the design, the additional content, the links, the stupid little buttons – I love all of that stuff. Extracting the words from that is, to me, to denude the weblog owner’s work far too much, it is to remove more context than I like. I have found that I much prefer a service like Blo.gs or something that lets me know when my favourite sites have been updated so I can go and read them myself, and in the format that the writer intended.
I don’t mind if you, dear reader, prefers to read this in either RSS or Atom formats (I provide both). But me? I prefer to get the full effort a person has made, not the minimalist version that RSS provides.
The eyes have it
The eyes have it. Glish, among many others, takes a break. But he has done it in style, that’s for damn sure. I agree with Heather though – my daily faves are dropping like flies.
