PubSub Sandbox

The little rabbit that runs around the Web and brings back the LinkCount information for us failed to show up for work today (maybe because we’re paying him peanuts instead of carrots?)

Seriously, one of of databases that stays up to midnight to run LinkCounts failed us. That has been fixed and we ran the statistics again. You might see some inconsistencies for February 16th.

Sorry about that.

Note: No rabbits are harmed during the running of LinkCounts.

-Steven Cohen
scohen@pubsub.com

It is my privilege to introduce our new editor for the Fashion Community List. In the past, I’ve been the editor and there is no way that I could do it justice simply because I’m not involved in the fashion community. But Designer Ella is. Here’s a bit more about our new editor.

“Ella was a casual blogger until winter of 2004, when she discovered blogging about shoes. Before then, she was a student, a graphic designer, a writer of poetry & nonfiction, a big shopper, and a dreamer of designing her own clothing line. Since the start of Kiss Me, Stace, her foray into the fashion blogosphere, she’s more serious about writing, and gets to use her web and design skills. Now, she blogs for business while fully attending college for English. (She even still sketches out fashion illustrations, and perhaps she now also dreams some big company or Daddy War bucks will notice her talent for handbag design, and take Ella to the ball.)”

It’s great to have Ella aboard. Also, if you have a fashion blog that doesn’t appear on this list, let her know (use the feedback form on the Fashion page).

Well, the “what the heck is wrong with my subscriptions” problem has been fixed. It seems that we had a post-matching issue going on. While that may not mean anything to you, it means a heck of a lot to us.

If you read the results directly from your browser (not an aggregator) and are still getting odd results, you may have to clear your browser cache. After you do that, the bad results will simply be replaced by the correct matches.

So, back to your regularly scheduled matches and thanks for your patience.

-Steven Cohen
scohen@pubsub.com

Many of you are seeing odd looking results in your subscription results having nothing to do with your queries.

The component responsible for packaging your results into ATOM/RSS format is having some reliability issues at this time, causing unexpected entries to appear in your subscription’s result feed. However, this problem is not present when you use the sidebar.

We just want to make you aware of this and also point out that this is not a problem with our matching engine and are working diligently on resolving this issue.

Thanks for your continued use and support of PubSub.

Over the past week, we put the finishing touches on a new community list for comics blogs. A librarian colleague at Temple University, Derik Badman, is one of the many comics bloggers out there and he has agreed to be our editor for this list. He’s blogged about it, mentioning:

“You can set-up ongoing searches for terms within the group of sites. For instance, if I wanted to know whenever someone posted about “Kevin Huizenga” on one of the sites, I could set up a search on his name, and then either 1) visit the site periodically to see updates or 2) subscribe to an RSS feed for that specific search, which would deliver new results right to my RSS reader (you do need to create an account for this feature, but it is free, easy, and spam free).”

The search feature is one of my favorite parts of the lists so I’m glad that Derik mentioned it.

Also, if you have been reading about Dave Winer’s ideas about reading lists, and love the idea (as I do!), you’ll notice that Dave is running our community lists on his community directory. I’m thrilled to be a part of it and we look forward to adding more reading lists to the community.

We’re going to attempt to bring you more lists on a more consistent basis. Also, if you would like to be an editor of a community list, send me a note.

Steven Cohen
scohen@pubsub.com

PubSub was featured in Walt Mossberg’s personal technology column today. Here’s what he had to say about PubSub and Rollyo (a really neat “Roll Your Own” search engine).

A few quotes:

“The Internet search business is a hot topic. But most of the talk centers on the advertising revenue it generates, not on what is happening in the actual search process itself. And most of the attention is paid to the search giants, like Google and Yahoo, rather than to smaller companies that are tinkering with interesting new techniques.”

“PubSub is an automated system that constantly matches your search terms against millions of blogs, online discussions, news releases and SEC filings, and notifies you when there is a match. Rollyo allows you to create your own little search engines, focused on topics you care about and sources you prefer. Both do things standard searches can’t.”