I have been a very vocal supporter of Pubsub.com and use their services very heavily. But it looks like Pubsub is on the verge of collapse and it appears that infighting within the company is the main issue. It’s sad when money gets in the way of development.
One of the founders has posted an amazing post and aired dirty laundry all over the net. It is one of the most revealing post I have seen in a very long time. [bobwyman.pubsub.com]
I have had a look at the new features at Pubsub and found that even though they have done a great job in detailing incoming and outgoing links they are missing large chunks of data. I did some link counting on my own and they are missing a large percentage of the outgoing and missing many of the incoming. I am not surprised but until a service can scale big enough to make sure that they are not missing anything their will be holes. [Pubsub Linkranks LinkCounts and SiteStats]
Oh and another thing most of their feeds are ATOM the question is were are all of the RSS feeds. This is a site wide issue. People are already confused enough when it comes to RSS and yet they have everything listed in RSS. They also promoting something called SB Enhanced which I have never heard of?
I am going to race over to Pubsub as soon as I hit publish on this and take a look at a service that is supposed to be rolling out today. They are going to be releasing a tool that allows you to measure blog effectiveness by category. Pretty powerful stuff and could help some of you attract specific advertisers and really get the ad rates you deserver for your targeted audiences. [Pubsub] [ClickZ]
I am sure this morning as Technorati, Pubsub and Feedster staff came to work their was a sense of, oh man why did this billion pound cement block just get dropped on my shoulders. If they did not realize it before they better now, their is competition out their and they better focus on their base services and make sure they don’t miss anything.
In the past 2 hours I have created the same 100 search terms that I have setup for Pubsub, Technorati, Feedster and IceRocket. In the dozen or so I setup last night I can tell you for a fact that I have 4-5 new net friends who have been posting links to Geek News Central for a long time that none of these other services caught.
Google is not catching everything but If I were an engineer at Google with their kind of resources I don’t think it will be long before the power of their indexing engine is going to start kicking some major butt.
That’s what happens when you have resources to make things happen.
Update: One additional comment, I have been quite vocal over the past year or so talking about levels of service amongst all of the sites that do blog search. I will hold Google to that same standard.
I do like David Sifry’s attitude but on the inside that have to be in a bit or crisis mode all I can say is stay focused and work faster than they do if you can. [David Sifry]
Jason Calacanis has been speaking very vocally about the Top 100 over at technorati, and he is indicating that Technorati is about to get their “bell rung” by their competition. He is more or less saying to Technorati that their Top 100 list is not fair nor is it accurate.
Now the question I always start asking when someone starts talking about Top 100 list is why are they raising a stink. It’s usually because either, their not in the list and think they should be, or because their is a financial motivation to see some people removed or knocked down a peg or two.
That being said this weblog has about as much a chance of making the Top 100 as winning the lotto. Considering Hawaii does not have a lotto the odds are pretty high.
If you look at Weblogs, Inc they have become quite the media powerhouse, and with Jason bragging that they could make a million dollars this year with adsense ads, I start to question why a company would make those types of claims or even say that in the first place.
It is one thing for people to realize you are making money hand over foot, but it is quite another to wave it in front of the entire nets face. What that does is piss people off. My daddy told me a long time ago, don’t let them see what you have in your wallet son keep them guessing. Was Jason’s bragging they may hit a million in adsense ads an attempt to try and lure in some investors by making overt financial earning statements without formally producing them. Their are some interesting SEC rules I have read recently that makes me understand why you have to be careful what you say about money in relation to investors.
My whole point is this, my position is that Weblogs, Inc is shopping for a suitor and the only way they can get eyeballs pointed their way is to make sure they dominate the Top 100 list and make overt financial statements. Call me a conspiracy theorist but you just wait and see.
On a side note, I love some of the products that Weblogs, Inc produces and wish them the best of luck but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. [Jason Calacanis]
Hey Doc
I do it every day, I have enough unique search terms setup to get a idea of who is getting it and who isn’t. I will say this all of them are missing a great deal and I am unsure how to explain it. I am almost positive that they really pay attention to the Top 100 or so link getters but the rest of us that are fighting for “Attention” seem to get lost in the crowd.
I find more people linking to my site through my referral logs than I do through most of these services. It is is obvious that most of them are companies that are too small to really be able to do a decent job at it all the time. Sure I love the service but they are missing stuff that’s down in the weeds.
My belief is that until the big search engines get on board this will continue to be the case. When the big search engines do get on board I feel sorry for those employed at [Technorati] [FeedBurner] [Pubsub] because if they don’t get acquired then they will see a lot of people shift to the all entailing big search engines. [Doc Searls]
I had a e-mail come in late last night from the Pubsub staff and they fixed my problem. Cool thing is they saw my problem obviously from a keyword they were tracking. They were concerned that my e-mail to support had went missing and actually had me send a test message to their site. Apparently this is a bug they are aware of. So if you are using Pubsub keyword searches and the results dry up send them a e-mail and tell them about it.. [Pubsub]