The Long Tail is Alive Again

I’ve brought back the Long Tail site. 

Between when I took it offline and now, the blo.gs site was purchased by Yahoo, and shut down public access to their ping service.  The site says to email them for access, but I did and got no response, so I’ve changed the way I find updated feeds to add.

Now, I’m polling the weblogs.com/shortChanges.xml file, looking specifically for blogging services I recognize, and altering the URL to be the RSS URL.  For example, an MSN Spaces blog looks like this:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/blogname

The RSS feed is simply this string with /feed.rss appended, so that’s what I do. 

This scheme has a couple of interesting consequences:

  • I’m only getting updates from a couple of major blogging services.  This means I see much less spam.
  • It also means every blogger who went to the trouble to get their own domain won’t show up.  This may lead to generally lower quality postings.  Time will tell.

I still find it interesting to hit the Long Tail site and just hit ‘n’ for a while and see what some random people are talking about.. I just find the chaotic nature of it interesting.