July 21, 2001

12:22 AM

Blogdex at media.mit.edu(The link may not work, I've gotten through twice now, both times between noon and 4pm PST, but every other time I've tried I've gotten server not available errors.)Does anyone know what this is? The times I got through it looked like an interesting cross tabulation of what is being covered in the web log world, like a handy index for people looking for entries on a certain topic. It was not complete looking when I got in last, the site mostly consisted of the front, and an "about" section, but the front page did have a list of the top ten links being talked about on currently indexed blogs. I found the link in my referer log.
posted by Nothing (15 comments total)

I hope I'm not messing up someone's project or grand opening by posting this.
posted by Nothing at 12:23 AM on July 21, 2001

you might have emailed to ask.
posted by rebeccablood at 12:40 AM on July 21, 2001

rebecca has a point, although you'd have to question the wisdom of people planning a secret grand opening around a blog project and not taking referrer logs into consideration, no?
posted by lia at 12:45 AM on July 21, 2001

it looks to me like a neo-beebo with big plans.
posted by rebeccablood at 12:46 AM on July 21, 2001

I would have emailed if I had been able to get back to the page and look for an email address. I did not see one when I was last there, but admittedly I wasn't specifically looking as I assumed I would be able to go back. That was three days ago.

Anyway, it looks like project done by someone who is fairly savvy, so I think they must have known it would get out via logs eventually, which may be when they are keeping the server offline most of the time.
posted by Nothing at 1:01 AM on July 21, 2001

I just got a note from the maintainer of the site; he's stranded in california and doesn't know why the server has gone down. he asked me to tell people to check back on monday, when everything should be up and running again.
posted by rebeccablood at 1:27 AM on July 21, 2001

How did you get a hold of him?
posted by Nothing at 1:28 AM on July 21, 2001

when I found the site yesterday, I clicked on the link that said "for more information" or somesuch, and he wrote back. tonight, I just shot a note off using that address.
posted by rebeccablood at 1:32 AM on July 21, 2001

I managed to log on. apparently it's an experiment to comb all the weblogs to create a news index of some sort.
posted by adnan at 2:02 AM on July 21, 2001

Sounds great. I've really been missing beebo's metalog over the last year or so. It was a great way of seeing what was actually going on in the world - in the community - what people were talking about - what was cutting-edge.
posted by barbelith at 4:31 AM on July 21, 2001

rebecca: it got featured in NTK's "Memepool" section this week ("BLOGS, without all that tedious 'personal commentary' stuff"), so any effect of its being posted to MeFi is probably just icing on the cake.
posted by holgate at 7:25 AM on July 21, 2001

New Approaches to Middle Media: MemeMail and Bloggdex:

"Cameron Marlow is developing a system that tracks and indexes the most popular posts on Blogger sites. By doing a regression analysis of Blogger posts, Cameron's system will be able to predict the emergence of a new meme before it has spread widely."

being posted to MeFi is probably just icing on the cake

Easy there, Nick. MeFi is the icing on no one's cake! (The gum on someone's shoe maybe...)
posted by jkottke at 1:07 PM on July 21, 2001

I was going to say "larding the trifle", Jason, but where that concept comes from, I really don't know.
posted by holgate at 2:15 PM on July 21, 2001

I knew I should have checked MeFi sooner. I spent about an hour or two yesterday trying to trackdown what this was, as I had found a link to this multiple times in my access log over the past few days.
posted by vanderwal at 7:59 PM on July 22, 2001

it looks to me like a neo-beebo with big plans

Isn't he a character in the sequel to The Matrix?
posted by bradlands at 8:20 PM on July 24, 2001