Sunday, 26 June 2005
BlogPulse Eats Own Dog Food
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Late Thursday night/early Friday morning I posted BlogPulse is Broken! Within 10 hours of that post Natalie Glance of Intelliseek, owners of BlogPulse posted this comment:
Now, this answer doesn't really satisfy me, but it is very cool that BlogPulse is posting on this blog in response to a potential issue. The only way they could be this responsive is if they use an aggregation service (like theirs) to constantly monitor, review and respond to these type of issues. Well done.
This story was also mentioned by Jeff Jarvis in BlogPulse need Caffeine? It's a huge honor to be mentioned by Mr. Jarvis. Thanks! Pete Blackshaw himself posted this comment on Buzz Machine:
Thanks Pete!
Despite Intelliseek's responsiveness, there are still some big unanswered questions, like what (more specifically) happened? As a researcher, I need an answer specific enough to understand the impact on any conclusions that I might draw from the data. Does BlogPulse play to retroactively fix the index for this portion of the data? Both comments from BlogPulse indicate that the error was isolated to the 20th , but the data I have examined, indicates that there was at least a smaller problem sometime before the 20th and significant persist even as I type this and the performance of BlogPulse remains nearly unusable. The really disturbing thing to me is that there is nothing on the BlogPulse site (that I can find) that indicates any problem, not to mention an explanation.
I have started preparing a slightly more thorough and scientific analysis of this problem in which I plan to pose some specific questions that I hope BlogPulse can answer in more detail.
Again, I think BlogPulse is a wonderful and significant contribution to the blogosphere and to the notion of using blog data for serious research. I just wish Intelliseek would deal with this problem a little more "head-on".
You are absolutely correct that it is necessary to normalize with respect to the number of blog posts indexed per day (vs. number collected). This is what we do. The downward trend is a bug in indexing that occurred on June 20th, not a systematic error. We're working on fixing those posts now.
Now, this answer doesn't really satisfy me, but it is very cool that BlogPulse is posting on this blog in response to a potential issue. The only way they could be this responsive is if they use an aggregation service (like theirs) to constantly monitor, review and respond to these type of issues. Well done.
This story was also mentioned by Jeff Jarvis in BlogPulse need Caffeine? It's a huge honor to be mentioned by Mr. Jarvis. Thanks! Pete Blackshaw himself posted this comment on Buzz Machine:
Yes, Matt Galloway found a bug in our system. It's not systematic, but appears to be an isolated error in indexing the blog posts on June 20th. Our tech engineers are looking carefully at the genesis of this bug and we expect it to be fixed shortly. Thanks to Matt for pointing this out and thank you for pinging me about this. Not always what you hope to hear, but then again, over half of what's we've done w/BlogPulse is the product of user feedback, so it all counts.
Thanks Pete!
Despite Intelliseek's responsiveness, there are still some big unanswered questions, like what (more specifically) happened? As a researcher, I need an answer specific enough to understand the impact on any conclusions that I might draw from the data. Does BlogPulse play to retroactively fix the index for this portion of the data? Both comments from BlogPulse indicate that the error was isolated to the 20th , but the data I have examined, indicates that there was at least a smaller problem sometime before the 20th and significant persist even as I type this and the performance of BlogPulse remains nearly unusable. The really disturbing thing to me is that there is nothing on the BlogPulse site (that I can find) that indicates any problem, not to mention an explanation.
I have started preparing a slightly more thorough and scientific analysis of this problem in which I plan to pose some specific questions that I hope BlogPulse can answer in more detail.
Again, I think BlogPulse is a wonderful and significant contribution to the blogosphere and to the notion of using blog data for serious research. I just wish Intelliseek would deal with this problem a little more "head-on".
Posted by at 11:55 PM in Technology & Culture
