Feedonomics

The “just do it” philosophy of the blogosphere has its advantages, but ironically transparency is not one of them. You would think that a group of people who obsessively document their daily and professional lives would leave a clear written trail that could be followed later, but that ignores the fact that the people involved in the blogosphere’s infrastructure also maintain back channel communications through email and in person at conferences. The result of this unwritten layer of communication is that beginnings of new projects receive a huge amount of postings and links, and failures or tapering off of projects are largely undocumented. By the time people fail to follow up on commitments, or companies involved in a project die off, everybody is so exasperated that they just walk away without posting an announcement.

The specific project I’m referring to here is the FeedMesh network. This was an attempt to coordinate the efforts of various independent ping services. The idea of a ping server is that blogs can send a message to a central server to announce when they have been updated. The ping server then makes this information available to other sites, such as blog search engines, so they can be more efficient and timely in updating their database. Rather than requesting a copy of every feed a search engine is tracking on a regular basis, the search engine only has to read the feed to gather new posts when a ping has been received. In theory, everyone involved with blog feeds would benefit from sharing ping notifications. In practice, established companies that are already being pinged directly by major blogging tools such as Wordpress are reluctant to share this information with less established competitors.

FeedMesh seems to have followed this trajectory from an excited, highly linked start to a slow death due to political and corporate in-fighting. John Keegan wrote a detailed primer on the history and motivations behind FeedMesh’s origin a year ago, and there was a Yahoo group and wiki. Unfortunately, the Yahoo group has been abandoned to the spammers and the wiki is now closed. What doesn’t seem to have been written is a clear post-mortem of its death. Is FeedMesh dead? Is it a casualty of Pubsub’s recent implosion? I know everyone who was building FeedMesh knows why it has gone silent. Maybe one of them could write a definitive post on its current state.