US + international: +1-212-796-6890
SE + international: +46-21-480-0920
Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).
That constant blog companion, the RSS feed, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. These days RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but that wasn’t always the case. The meaning of RSS has changed a number of times since its initial inception in 1999.
Here is a look at the evolution of the meaning of RSS.
Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.
For this survey we have monitored the websites of nine blogging services for a period of four months to see how much downtime they have. The included services were Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogster, Blog.com, Vox, Squarespace, Windows Live Spaces and LiveJournal.
The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.
Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.
An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.
For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)
But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?
The blogging service Blog.com was unavailable almost 8 hours straight last Friday (January 16).
The outage started at 5:05 a.m. CET and didn’t end until 12:50 p.m. CET (a total of 7 hours and 45 minutes). The site was completely unreachable during that time, indicating either a server or network failure.
We all know that Wordpress is popular among bloggers, and Movable Type as well. But HOW popular? And what other platforms are being used? To find out, we went through the Technorati top 100 blogs and investigated what blog platforms they are using. It turned out to be a highly interesting survey with plenty of surprises along the way.
As a by-product we also found out some interesting things about the more popular blog networks. For example, did you know that Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media together have 22 of the top 100 blogs?
The blog search engine Technorati suffered from both downtime and slowdown during large periods of December 12 and 13. In those two days, the Technorati website was completely unavailable for a total of more than 9 hours.
There are indications that the problems may have been caused by database issues at Technorati.
Many of the blogs that have a huge following today go back to much more humble beginnings. This post is a look at how they got started and what they looked like in their early days, compared to today.
All of the websites presented below are among the 15 most popular blogs according to Technorati. We relied on the Internet Archive to get screenshots of the old versions of these websites.
As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we launched a new design last week. We hope you like it.
Aside from the general visual design change, there are some other new things as well…
For example, now you can write your own guest posts.
We started using FeedBurner just a couple of months ago. This has allowed us to get some reasonable statistics on the number of people who have subscribed to the Royal Pingdom RSS feed.
We are happy to say that the numbers have been growing, slowly but steadily. Lately, our blog has started to go above 1,000 [...]
Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 into the wild on June 30, prompting millions of downloads and a ton of mentions in tech press and blogs all over the world.
Considering all this attention, Firefox should have been a pretty hot search topic on Google that day. Right?
This has to be one of the more bizarre gadgets we’ve seen lately. It’s a Japanese device called the Akiduki Pulse box that automatically posts your heart rate to Twitter.
This week Google launched a new Web community on code.google.com/speed. The goal is to help Web developers speed up their Web applications, but the long-term goal is even more ambitious; to work together to make the Web as a whole a lot faster.
Microsoft has been drumming up its marketing for Internet Explorer 8 lately, with some interesting results. That marketers can be a bit, shall we say… “creative”… when touting a product is well known, but the question is if Microsoft’s marketing team hasn’t taken it a bit too far with their “Get the Facts” campaign, especially when they start comparing IE8 to other web browsers.
Financial Times just published an article about the “secret war on web crooks.” The article contains several interesting tidbits of information about spam and the challenges of trying to prevent it.
