I sent an e-mail to the Bloglines media rep yesterday and have received no response. Have they finished the move to the new servers? Are the problems that have plagued users for the past few months solved? Who knows? There’s no update on the Bloglines site.

On the plus side, my readership at Bloglines has apparently doubled in the past 24 hours. That would be cool, if it were true, but I’m skeptical…

Transparency is a good thing.

I was baffled to read this post from Chris Lanier. And then I read the discussion under this post by Alexander Grundner and it all made sense. Sadly.

The only thing worse than a site that allows no comments is one that is dishonest with its commenting policy. You don’t learn anything by sticking your fingers in your ears when people disagree with you.

Dwight, you didn’t tell me you added a full-text feed!

(Thanks to Mike Torres for the pointer.)

Update: It’s an experiment, Dwight says. Even if you don’t live in Houston, you should visit his site and subscribe to his feed.

John Walkenbach is running an interesting experiment.

OK, I’ll play.

Bloglines has been having major problems for at least a week, maybe longer. A company spokesperson has acknowledged that the problems will only be solved when the whole site is moved to a new server farm, and the company has not said when that is going to happen.

Yesterday, in a comment on this site, Cathy Thompson, who handles media relations at Bloglines, promised more “transparency” and committed to updating the Bloglines announcements page with details of the problem and the solution. I sent an e-mail to Cathy today reminding her of that commitment, and she replied with a note that said, “Yes, we will blog it today.”

As of 5:00 PM PST, that page has no such announcement. Hey, Bloglines: It is really easy to post to a blog. Your own database had a half-billion posts in it two months ago and is growing by a few million posts every day! Can’t you do just one simple, honest explanation?

After at least a week of serious problems, Bloglines is still practicing mushroom management. Sorry if that sounds cold, but it’s the truth.

Update: The announcements page was updated last night at 11:00 PM with a short item that says: “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.”

Still no details on when users can expect the move to be complete. Days? Weeks? Months?

For years, I’ve been recommending Steve Kropla’s World Electric Guide as the definitive source of information about all things electrical. For the world traveler, it’s indispensable. If you’re planning to visit another country and you want to know what kind of adapter to bring and whether your 110V power supply will work, this is the place to start. There’s even a copiously illustrated guide to electric plugs in use, with a picture of the plug labeled A, B, C and so on, which is keyed to the Electric Power Around the World table, where each country is listed, along with voltage, frequency, and the letter or letters that correspond to the plug type(s) used in that country.

It’s a great site, and it’s been around for a long, long time. Kropla’s copyright notice is dated 1996. The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archives has a record of crawling the page in 1998, and there’s an archived copy of the page from early 1999 that contains much of the same basic information you’ll find there today.

So imagine my surprise when I visit Charles Arthur’s site today and see a pointer to a completely different site called Electricity Around the World. It’s part of a larger site called World Standards, run by Conrad H. McGregor. The Wayback Machine first took notice of this page in early 2003. It uses very similar illustrations and a strikingly similar table (lacking many of the details in Kropla’s version) to make some of the same points.

I don’t think this is plagiarism. The writing at both sites is sufficiently different, and it’s entirely plausible that McGregor used the same source material to build his site from scratch. Given the popularity of Kropla’s site, though, it is puzzling that the other site, which started many years later, doesn’t link to it or list any other sources. To Kropla’s credit, he lists many of his sources, and he has updated the signature table at the site with personal observations that really enhance its value. When you dig into both sites, you can see that Kropla.com has much more detail, although either site will do the trick if you’re simply trying to answer the question of which plug adaptor to take to Australia or Zambia.

My contribution here is to review the two sites and recommend one over the other. Kropla.com still gets the nod.

The greatest comic strip ever drawn has been gone for a decade now. But fortunately, it lives on through the miracle of the WWW. Today’s strip (from August 9, 1994) is especially good.

Start.com offers Calvin as one of its popular feeds, so you can add it your Start page with a single click.

In the comments to a post I published this weekend, Cathy Thompson of Bloglines addresses the complaints I raised about the recent problems with the service:

Man, you guys are cold!

1. Absolutely not BS. We’re not trying to hide anything. Point taken that we should blog an update.
2. Bloglines has a blog and have had one since the service began. It is called Bloglines News, every member has an auto subscription. We post everything there, including service updates.
3. Bloglines has several user forums, also live since the beginning. They are accessible on our site from the Services page, and you’re welcome to participate there.

Bloglines is not a massive faceless corporation. We’re a small team, still led by founder Mark Fletcher, dedicated to building a great free service. There’s no hidden agenda, no vast advertising conspiracy — our motivation is that we love Bloglines and we want others to love it too.

Running a service like Bloglines is a massive technical challenge. We add 2-3 million new blog and feed articles every day, and while that is happening machines break, databases bork, upgrades happen. We get frustrated when it doesn’t work the way we want, and we’re doing our best to get it right.

Thank you, Cathy, for responding. I have no doubt that the Bloglines team consists of great people who are trying really hard to deliver a good service. But in your comments you didn’t address a single one of the questions about your service. What is the problem? How extensive is it? When do you expect it to be fixed? What is your technical team doing to ensure that this problem won’t happen again? Why don’t your support people tell users that this is an ongoing problem when they send in a support request?

You say “Bloglines has a blog … called Bloglines News.” If you’re referring to this page, I respectfully disagree. This is an announcements page with an RSS feed. There were two posts in April (one a joke on April Fools Day), one in May, one in June, and four in July. In every case, the content was either a press release or a simple announcement of a server outage or scheduled downtime. The “blog” doesn’t accept comments, none of the entries are signed by a real person, there’s no sense of community, there’s nothing to give us a sense of what it’s like to run this service. Simply putting an RSS feed on a Web page doesn’t make it a blog.

You also say, “Bloglines has several user forums … They are accessible on our site from the Services page.” Cathy, I searched the Bloglines site for an hour and never saw any mention of forums. I finally found the link you’re referring to. For the record, it is buried far down a page headed Bloglines Services, with a bunch of bold headings aimed at developers. that says: “We have created several forums to discuss the Bloglines Web Services and to announce new developments.”

I visited the forums page, and sure enough there is a Bloglines Discussion group (“not monitored by Bloglines Customer Care” it says in italics) and a Bloglines Suggestion Box. According to the Bloglines Forums home page, there are 140 registered members. They’ve contributed a grand total of 150 forum posts since last October. That’s roughly one post every other day. Not exactly a lively spot.

In the meantime, the 330 people who subscribe to my feed through Bloglines are getting a crappy experience. This is the fourth post I’ve published in the past 24 hours, but no one who reads this feed through Bloglines has seen any of them.

Bloglines has earned an amazing amount of goodwill from the blogging community for its pioneering work. You want people to believe you when you say that running Bloglines poses “a massive technical challenge” and that you have “no hidden agenda”? Talk to us! Follow the example of the people who write the blogs you serve up. How you respond to this crisis will determine whether you build more goodwill or allow it to dissipate.

Several people have e-mailed me this story from today’s New York Times: Google’s Chief Is Googled, to the Company’s Displeasure:

CNETNews.com, a technology news Web site, said last week that Google had told it that the company would not answer any questions from CNET’s reporters until July 2006. The move came after CNET published an article last month that discussed how the Google search engine can uncover personal information and that raised questions about what information Google collects about its users.

The article, by Elinor Mills, a CNET staff writer, gave several examples of information about Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, that could be gleaned from the search engine. These included that his shares in the company were worth $1.5 billion, that he lived in Atherton, Calif., that he was the host of a $10,000-a-plate fund-raiser for Al Gore’s presidential campaign and that he was a pilot.

After the article appeared, David Krane, Google’s director of public relations, called CNET editors to complain, said Jai Singh, the editor in chief of CNETNews.com. “They were unhappy about the fact we used Schmidt’s private information in our story,” Mr. Singh said. “Our view is what we published was all public information, and we actually used their own product to find it.”

He said Mr. Krane called back to say that Google would not speak to any reporter from CNET for a year.

In an instant-message interview, Mr. Krane said, “You can put us down for a ‘no comment.’ “

I actually heard about this last week, based only on an offhand comment near the end of another CNET News story, and I found it hard to believe. But apparently it’s true.

This is a monumentally stupid move. I asked my wife, a PR professional with lots of experience, what she thought, and she said, “Who is their agency? They should be fired.” She also pointed out that cutting off all of CNET for a year is just dumb. The story you didn’t want is already out there. Deal with it. Cutting off CNET gives you one less channel to tell the story you want the public to hear. And in this case, at least, it also provides a shiny new story that’s making you look stupid and is getting far more play than the original one.

If the PR folks at Google were really smart, they wouldn’t have actually told the folks at CNET that they were cutting them off. If they were intent on “punishing” the reporter, they just make sure to return every other call from every other publication before they get to hers. Of course, true professionals don’t play petty games like that; they stay focused on the business and they work extra hard to win over the people who write negative stories.

Google’s motto, reportedly is: “Don’t be evil.” Maybe they need to add “Don’t be stupid, either.”