Weblogs.Com Outage for Many Conversant Sites

According to Seth Dillingham, Weblogs.Com has started ignoring pings from many Conversant sites, including this one.

Seth writes,

I’ve debugged the pings we’re sending, repeatedly. The server always returns the “thanks for the ping” response that indicates the ping was received successfully. Yet, our sites are never listed. The same is true for pings I’ve sent manually. It appears to be accepting the pings and then ignoring or forgetting them.

The service is run by Dave Winer. I wrote to Dave on May 6th to find out if he knew about the problem. No response. I wrote again on May 8th. Still no response. I wrote again this morning. Still no response.

Wow, there’s a shock. Remember how Dave freaked out when he thought Google and de-indexed his sites and how angry he was because he couldn’t get a response from the company? But, hey, the rules don’t apply to Dave. If he wants a problem to go unresolved for weeks at a time, its not a bug, its a feature.

Since I know the pings are going through correctly, and Dave is ignoring my email, I’m concluding that we’re being intentionally ignored. Why, though? I haven’t a clue. Is it something personal against me? Something technical about Conversant that he doesn’t like? (Then why didn’t he inform me?) Is it some business consideration? (I can’t imagine what that could be, since Dave isn’t in business right now.)

. . .

Being ignored by weblogs.com isn’t the end of the world, but there are a number of blog tracking and categorization systems (including Blogshares) that using its changes.xml files in the heart of their applications. Not being listed means we basically fall off the radar.

Yep. Not a major problem; more of an annoyance. A service so widely used by others probably needs to be in the hands of someone a bit more stable and responsive to fixing outages than Dave.

Dave’s great at innovating and coming up with incredible ideas, but he’s not the person you want in charge of implementation and support.

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