SiliconBeat, part of the Mercury News family, confirms that Bloglines is having “issues”:

If you’re one of the many folks who read SiliconBeat through Bloglines, you may have noticed that our content is sometimes many hours old by the time it shows up in your Bloglines reader. Apparently, Bloglines is struggling with growth issues. Spokeswoman Cathy Thompson tells us the service has outgrown its current set-up, “and that’s slowing down the processing of new posts during peak hours.” Thompson characterized it as a temporary problem, until Bloglines can move to a new co-location server facility run by its parent company, Ask Jeeves/IAC. Here’s hoping the move comes sooner rather than later.

Pardon me, but this is BS. Why isn’t this information posted on the Bloglines site? Why don’t support representatives include this information in their correspondence with people who send them e-mail reports of problems?  When do they expect to have a fix? Why doesn’t Bloglines have a community site where users can exchange information? Why doesn’t Bloglines have a blog?

Meanwhile, NewsGator Online (also free) is getting more reliable every day. If you’re dissatisfied with Bloglines, check it out.

So, after I complained yesterday about Bloglines not updating itself, I started keeping an eye on the spider. After taking almost all of Thursday off (including the entire business day on both coasts), it woke up around just before midnight last night, and it came back a few times early this morning. But then the Bloglines spider apparently decided to take the rest of the day off, because it hasn’t been back in nearly seven hours.

A commenter on the previous thread notes that he is experiencing the same problem with the Slashdot feed.

Most blogs, including this one, thrive on a sense of immediacy. Indeed, using NewsGator I get updates at least once an hour, which means I can stay on top of breaking news. If Bloglines just starts ignoring some feeds for hours or days at a time, it’s broken. If it keeps doing that, it’s time to be replaced.

Isn’t it strange that no one from Bloglines has noticed this post and reacted to it? You’d think a company at the center of the blogosphere would be tuned in to reports of problems like this. Unless the priorities from the new corporate masters were taking them away from this core business. You know what I mean?

AP report:

America Online Inc. said Thursday it has bought the online storage company Xdrive Inc. to meet the growing needs of consumers with rapidly expanding collections of digital music, photos and other files.

Wow, that was close. I just canceled my Xdrive account about two months ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with the service. In fact, Xdrive’s technology and support were great. I just wasn’t using it, and it made no sense to pay $100 a year for something I wasn’t using. At $2.99 a month, Box.net is a much better deal. (Disclosure: Box.net very briefly advertised on this site a year ago, and I have a complimentary account on the service.)

I expect Xdrive to go downhill rapidly now that AOL is in charge. I hope I’m wrong.

I got a response from Bloglines support saying they were resetting the feed for this site, but so far not one of my posts from today has reached Bloglines.

I’ve heard this complaint from others as well, so I don’t think it’s an isolated incident.

Mark Fletcher, is something going wrong at your company?

Chris Anderson, in the process of writing The Long Tail, is highly motivated to learn exactly what Amazon.com’s sales ranking numbers mean. Today’s post on the subject is fascinating:

Amazon still isn’t releasing the hard numbers, but we do at least have a bit more experience at reverse-engineering them. A number of other academics have taken a stab at it since then, as well as some independent experts.

I asked one of them, Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, to extend the analysis he’s done over the past two years on correlating Amazon sales rank to absolute sales and apply that approach to the Long Tail. Fortunately, he took to the project with a vengeance and has built the beginning of what may be the best analytical framework for estimating Amazon’s sales yet.

If you’re interested in how someone reverse-engineers the workings of Amazon, read Rosenthal’s excerpt at the end of the post. It’s fascinating.

According to Feedburner, 1217 people are subscribed to this site via RSS (thank you very much!). Of that number, 328 use Bloglines. Unfortunately, you Bloglines users are getting a subpar experience, because Bloglines regularly, for no apparent reason, decides to stop picking up this feed. In fact, if you read this site via Bloglines, you probably think I haven’t posted anything since yesterday at 1:37 pm (MDT), even though this is post #4 since that time. I have no idea when you will actually see this post

Bloglines seems to do this regularly. As Feedburner recommended, I sent an e-mail to Bloglines Support asking them to please kick-start my feed, but I really shouldn’t have to do that.

Is anyone at Bloglines listening? This seems to be a downward spiral in quality. Is it growing pains? Was being acquired by Ask Jeeves a bad deal for Bloglines users? Is the fact that Bloglines is now a tiny cog in the giant IAC/InterActive Corp. relevant to this discussion? Any other folks with Bloglines stories to tell?

The results of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, and the winner is one of us! Yes, as the founders note, grand prize winner Dan McKay is “a 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains … A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.”

The achievement in question is this amazingly bad opening sentence for a novel that (of course) does not exist, which is after all the whole point of the Bulwer-Lytton contest:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

The competition was fierce, based on entries like this one:

It was high noon in the jungles of South India when I began to recognize that if we didn’t find water for our emus soon, it wouldn’t be long before we would be traveling by foot; and with the guerilla warriors fast on our heals, I was starting to regret my decision to use poultry for transportation.

And this one, from the Children’s Literature division:

Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.

And a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they can do this for a living:

Inside his cardboard box, Greg heated a dented can of Spaghetti-O’s over a small fire made from discarded newspapers, then cracked open his last can of shoplifted generic beer to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his embarkation on a career as a freelance writer.

Go read the rest.

The folks at O’Reilly have started a new group blog called Annoyances Central. Obviously, the point of the site is to promote their series of Annoyances books, but the lineup of writers is impressive and includes a bunch of people I have worked with and admired over the years: Robert Luhn, Dan Tynan, Steve Bass, Preston Gralla, and more.

Best of all, you can get a free copy of Onfolio 2.0 Personal Edition (a $29.95 value and an excellent RSS reader/info manager) if you visit between now and August 8th.

Tell ’em I sent you.

I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, I love red wine, and I’m especially partial to Italian reds. So this certainly caught my eye:

Legendary American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan may not have had a chart-busting album for a while, but his red Italian signature wine is an international hit.

The wine, named Planet Waves after his 1974 album, is made by the Fattoria Le Terrazze winery here in Italy’s central-eastern Marche region and is a vintage blend of 75% Montepulciano and 25% Merlot.

Despite a steep price of some $65 a bottle, all 415 cases made the first year sold by November, more than half of them sent to the United States, and the only complaints were that there was not enough of it.

If you’ve been wondering what to get me for my birthday (September 29), wonder no more.

(More details here.)

Dan has a full-length comparative review of his new kitten, complete with feature table.