I had no idea that Talk Like A Pirate Day was sneaking up on us. I’m thoroughly unprepared! (And if you’re from Germany, you’re expected to play along, too.)

Arrr!

(via New MexiKen)

This morning I noticed that the scripts that link to the Blogads servers weren’t working, and that page loading was being impacted severely. I commented out the script code and then started doing some investigative work.

A whois lookup shows that the domain registration for the Blogads.com servers was changed today. It now points to the parent company called PressFlex, whose main address is in Budapest, Hungary. But the ad servers themselves appear to be offline.

Henry Copeland at Blogads has done a good job at building up this service. It’s very widely used across the Internet, especially among political blogs. I hope this is just a simple DNS error and that it gets sorted out soon.

Update: Henry says it was indeed a stupid domain error:

We screwed up our domain name registry entry yesterday afternoon, which means we made our servers’ addresses invisible to much of the Internet. A stupid human error which should not have occured. I went home last night thinking everything would be ok in 30 minutes, and didn’t blog about the problem because I was unable to access the blog server myself. The error propagated very quickly, but the correction has taken longer to spread. (As my colleague noted, bad news travels faster than good news. )

I’ve now restored the Blogads strip on the right and all should be well again.

That was quick. On Sunday, I pointed to Gabe Rivera’s self-deprecating comments about the service he founded, and on Monday the new version is out, in two flavors, a Tech Web and a cleaner view of the original Politics/News version.

Scoble says:

It’s a news page for blogs. It tells you what bloggers find important. Right now.

I remain to be convinced. The tech page looks promising, but my first reaction to the political page is that it’s worse than before.

More than anything, what this service needs is a bozo filter. There are many sources in both tech and political news that I consider to be just noise. Some are routinely inaccurate, others add nothing of value to the conversation. Gabe, give me a way to filter these people out.

Now let’s see if this comment makes it into tech.memeorandum.

Update: Richard MacManus has this concise description:

How it works: the more people that link to a blog post, the bigger the headline. The biggest and most recent headlines are at the top of the page, but move down as newer popular stories emerge to take their place. Below the original source of each story are links to other bloggers who have linked to it. But the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won’t do.

All in all, it’s like a hybrid of populicio.us and the New York Times!

It’s almost entirely automated too, which amazed me when I found out – because the quality of the posts and stories that it uncovers is top notch. As is the connecting together of all relevant links, which Gabe has an excellent phrase for: “relate the conversation”. I’ve been using this new version of memeorandum as my prime source of breaking blog news for the past couple of months. It’s so quick to scan and find out what’s hot in the tech blogosphere.

The link to this piece came, ironically, through tech.memeorandum.

I continue to be impressed with NewsGator. If you’ve signed up for the NewsGator Online service, be sure to check out the NewsGator Forums, where even the founder of the service is an active participant. Recently, NewsGator made a change to their service to improve the way it handles older feeds. The result is that many NewsGator subscribers temporarily saw old posts from some feeds duplicated. Without any warning, subscribers might have assumed there was a problem, but to their credit, NewsGator publicly announced that the change was on the way.

This is how a responsible company does business in the 21st Century. Bloglines, are you paying attention?

Update: A commenter notes that Bloglines has forums, too. Yes, I’ve pointed that out before. But unlike NewsGator, which makes the link to those forums obvious from their Support page, Bloglines provides no link to their forums except for one obscure reference that suggests the forums are for developers. The results are obvious: I just checked NewsGator’s forums, where the status line informs me “1,403 members have posted a total of 4,764 replies within 1,561 topics in 8 visible forums.” By contrast, Bloglines (with a much larger subscriber base) has 143 forum members who have posted a total of 186 replies in 95 topics. It’s been almost a week since the last post on the Bloglines forum, whereas the NewsGator forum has new posts every day.

Representatives of NewsGator participate in their forums. In fact, I’ve seen changes to the service rolled out within days as a result of feedback from a member on the forums. No one from Bloglines participates in their forums, and in fact I can’t even get people at the company to reply to e-mails that I send.

It’s almost as if Bloglines has been abandoned by its new management. The technical infrastructure is horribly broken, customer support is nonexistent, and the CEO is more interested in flying his plane than in running the company.

According to an announcement on the Bloglines News page, one of their crawler machines crashed yesterday, causing an outage that lasted until very late in the day. They say everything should be fixed by now.

But what’s really curious is that two announcements have been scrubbed from the News page. One was the August 9 notice that read, in full:

Bloglines Update

Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue — we’ve simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn’t put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.

That notice appeared after I criticized Bloglines in a series of posts and exchanged some e-mail messages and comment threads with a Bloglines spokesperson. It was there yesterday, when I pointed out that Russell Beattie had noticed problems at Bloglines as well.

In yesterday’s post, I asked Bloglines to post an update on the status of the server move. And today the August 9 announcement is gone. Down the memory hole.

I have an e-mail in to another contact at Ask Jeeves, the new parent company of Bloglines, requesting an explanation. I’ll pass along their response.

Update: The Ask Jeeves flack who got back to me says “the announcement was removed accidentily and we are still in the process of the move.”

What? This so-called server relocation has now taken a full month, with no end in site. This is bullshit. Here’s my follow-up e-mail to the Bloglines spokesperson:

Thanks for the update. I’ve asked this question several times and can’t understand why no one has answered it yet. Maybe you can help.

When is the server move scheduled to be completed? I have honestly never heard of a move of this sort that takes more than a week, much less drag on for a month.

Your very large and very loyal customer base has a right to ask that question, don’t you think?

I look forward to your reply.

But I certainly won’t be holding my breath. My most recent post has been up on my site for more than five hours, but my 359 subscribers who use Bloglines still haven’t seen it. That’s pitiful. Mark Fletcher, maybe you need to make a few phone calls and find out what your people are actually doing. They seem to have taken the summer off.

Russ Beattie, who gets more traffic in an hour than I get in a week, says he’s about ready to give up on Bloglines:

Lots of Bloglines folk have pinged me about the fact that my site isn’t updating. Not much I can do. I’ve emailed them several times to fix their “jsession” bug (where they include Java Server Sessions as part of the URL) or to just delete every feed of mine except for the index.rss main feed. But that doesn’t seem to happen. I’ve done redirects on old feed URLs so it should work. I think Bloglines is starting to get crufty – there’s lots and lots of things that aren’t working, and the site is starting to bog down like crazy. I was really hoping that the move to Ask Jeeves would accelerate updates and improvements, not stall them.

As part of a promised commitment to be more transparent in providing information to their large customer base, Bloglines posted exactly one lame update back on August 9. “Everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete,” that update said.

Apparently the Bloglines staff is making the change to their hosting service using sneakernet. That would explain why they keep ignoring my e-mail messages.

I’ve expressed my displeasure before with the hideous ads from Vibrant Media. These are the hyperlinks that appear within stories where certain keywords appear; the links are usually indicated by a double underline or an underline of a different color.

My objection is that these links are usually completely inappropriate; some advertiser “bought” a keyword and the ads pollute a medium where hyperlinks have a traditional meaning.

Today I saw the ultimate example of how bad these ads can get. In a story about the horrible floods in Mississippi and Louisiana (no, I refuse to link to the site where the story originally appeared – I just stumbled across it through Google News), I read these two paragraphs:

Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said a levee holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain breached, forcing the air evacuation of 90 patients from a hospital.

“The city of New Orleans is in a state of devastation,” Nagin told WWL-TV. “We probably have 80 percent of our city underwater. With some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet.”

It’s a horrible human tragedy. But thanks to Vibrant Media, I was able to mouse over the word devastation and see this pop-up ad:

That’s disgraceful.

Thanks to Dwight Silverman, I found this collection of amazing T-shirts, all inspired by the comic “Goats.”

How can you not like Infinite Monkey Gus?

Although Republicans for Voldemort (based on this strip) is also nearly irresistible.