Bullshit, Reputation, Social Media, Web 2.0.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory but all the 3 services seem to be broken at the same time.

Technorati has eaten my authority of 330+ and does not display my blog altogether anymore. This way you also won’t notice on Technorati that I linked you.

Feedburner has has swallowed more than 100 subscribers (504 on February 20th, 393 February 21st) so the current state equals that of 6 weeks ago. When you look closely at the numbers you notice that only the Google Feedfetcher numbers plummeted almost exactly by the number of lacking subscribers. Yesterday I had 278 Google Feedfetcher subscribers while today only 153. I checked it in Google Webmaster Tools and 153 is the number of RSS subscribers. They have ignored Atom subscribers and other URLs (slightly different feed URLs like http://seo2.0.onreact.com/feed/rss or http://seo2.0.onreact.com/feed/

[Update February 22nd: Feedburner has been fixed, the subscribers are back to normal at 527]

StumbleUpon does not send me any traffic after an initial push of ca. 300 visitors after the first stumble aka discovery of my latest article about reputation management although 8 people (me included) reviewed the post and all in all 20 stumblers “liked it” until now. This is not the first time, SU reacts completely unaccountable for over a week now, posts with a few stumbles get much more traffic than highly popular posts for instance.

The Web 2.0 makes you rely on third party services which are not reliable or trustworthy.

On days like this you realize that you are very dependent on them. What alternatives are there?

  • How do you measure your blog success aside from using Technorati, Feedburner and StumbleUpon?
  • Have you also been hit by these bugs, outages and inconsistencies lately?
  • Do you rely on free third party tools for crucial tasks?

I wonder if I was too naive using the above mentioned services. AideRSS seems to be a neat alternative to find out how your blog performs out there. It focuses on comments, del.icio.us bookmarks and Digg votes. I boycott Digg but the other two are good indicators. I’m waiting for such a mashup with Sphinn and Mixx votes.

Add to:

Related posts:

  1. Broken Social Media: 5 Anti-Social Sites vs Alternatives
  2. The New Delicious Front Page is Broken and Easily Gamed
  3. 10 Reasons Why Mixx is Broken and How to Fix it
  4. The Most Important Thing on StumbleUpon: Do Not Pose as, Be a Legit User
  5. How to Hit the Frontpage of StumbleUpon

February, 2008 | You can follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback.

This thing has 10 Comments

  1. Oliver Taco (3 comments.)
    Posted February 22, 2008 at 12:30 am | Permalink

    Well, if you have to reload your website back into Technorati, you’ll want to use our backlink pinger to tell Technorati and PingOMatic what is going on.

    -OT

  2. Paul M. Banas (7 comments.)
    Posted February 22, 2008 at 3:11 am | Permalink

    Ouch! The web gods are certainly unhappy. Did you inadvertently kick Tim Berners-Lee’s dog in a park somewhere?

  3. James Duthie (23 comments.)
    Posted February 22, 2008 at 9:12 am | Permalink

    Hmmm… I noticed an abnormal jump in subscribers that was out of proportion with recent traffic.

    I was thrilled, but couldn’t put a logical explanation to it. This ‘bug’ may be the answer I wasn’t looking for.

  4. web design barcelona (1 comments.)
    Posted February 22, 2008 at 10:27 am | Permalink

    Yes, it happened to me too. My Feedburner count halved (from 226 to 117), and StumbleUpon traffic dropped to almost nothing on a few articles that had been bringing in steady traffic. Glad I’m not the only one!

  5. Matt Ridout (5 comments.)
    Posted February 22, 2008 at 11:51 am | Permalink

    Can’t comment of the first 2 but I can say that SU isn’t broken at all.

    I get traffic from discoveries made months ago and continue to get new thumbs up and reviews.

    Although there is a problem with SU not direcdtly related to this which I will blog about today ;)

  6. James Duthie (23 comments.)
    Posted February 23, 2008 at 1:40 am | Permalink

    My subscriber count is now back to its former glory :( Might be an idea to check it again today Tad.

  7. onreact (591 comments.)
    Posted February 23, 2008 at 1:44 pm | Permalink

    Yeah James, it’s back up since yesterday. Feeburner fixed it quickly. Technorati still ignores my blog.

    Matt: I get traffic from old post too, but new posts are ignored more or less.

    @ all: Thanks for the feedback and suggestions! :-)

  8. MC (1 comments.)
    Posted February 26, 2008 at 6:37 am | Permalink

    Were you the discoverer of all your articles on Stumbleupon? Because from what I’ve heard, the system is based on the law of diminishing returns for discoveries from the same site.

  9. onreact (591 comments.)
    Posted February 26, 2008 at 10:18 am | Permalink

    MC: Not at all. I almost never “discover” my own articles. The contrary is the case.

  10. gaus surahman (1 comments.)
    Posted June 16, 2009 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

    I noticed the problem yesterday in my new site. I am not alone. Even a year after this post.

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