I sent an e-mail to the Bloglines media rep yesterday and have received no response. Have they finished the move to the new servers? Are the problems that have plagued users for the past few months solved? Who knows? There’s no update on the Bloglines site.
On the plus side, my readership at Bloglines has apparently doubled in the past 24 hours. That would be cool, if it were true, but I’m skeptical…
Transparency is a good thing.
Ed Bott 
Ed,
You of all people shouldn’t be talking about transparency, especially when we all know that you still have a lot of things that haven’t been explained to your readers.
And seriously cut Bloglines some slack. Did you even read your own post?
“Your own database had a half-billion posts in it two months ago and is growing by a few million posts every day!”
You should be celebrating the growth of Bloglines, instead of complaining that they ran out of server space. You acuse them of “mushroom management” for having enough sense to stick an intern on you. Frankly, I would have done the same thing.
Not that I disagree with the last commenter, but the last commenter is totally wrong.
The reason I love my Ed Bott is because he calls B.S. when he sees B.S. and he believes in keeping feet to the fire. In fact, I bet Ed Bott is one of the only people in the Southwest corner of the U.S. to have a fireplace, and surely one of the only ones to have a fireplace full of feet. Stinky Bloglines feet, stinky Dell feet, stinky Tech Journalist feet and… wait a second… even one of Bill Gates’ stinky feet. My friends, that’s a lot of feet.
Why cut Bloglines slack?? Because their site is pretty cool? Their feed refresh rate is inexcusably slow and they do a poor job of keeping up with updated posts. They are trying to serve the blog community, a community which lives and thrives off of the exchange of timely information. If Bloglines doesn’t do a good and uniform job of updating their cache, then they cause (albeit unintetionally) people to be left out of the conversation.
Celebrate the growth of Bloglines?? The blogosphere is growing, and that’s cool, but if services like Bloglines and Technorati can’t keep up, what’s to celebrate?
Ed Bott isn’t transparent?? Who cares. I don’t know what Ed does (other than write books), and I don’t care. I don’t read his blog to keep up with some random company’s PR crap, I read it because Ed has stinky feet in his fireplace.
I say, keep it up Ed. Use your powers for good.
Jason, I’m now afraid to turn on my fireplace. No telling what sort of smells are going to come out of it!
Seth, this is the second time you’ve come in here and dropped innuendos about some mythical conflict of interest on my part. I addressed those issues last time, and I fail to see how they’re relevant here. If you think I have some sort of financial conflict with Bloglines, please tell me about it, because I sure would like to find out where I’m supposed to be making money off of this.
I love the argument that we should celebrate Bloglines for its growth, even as it proves itself incapable of dealing with that growth. Bigger is better, regardless of competence? What an interesting concept!
Oh, and I don’t think Cathy Thompson, Bloglines’ Director of Media Relations, is going to appreciate being demoted to intern. You might want to apologize to her for that one.
Did you notice the “database crash” that resulted in the Bloglines Plumber* taking over for several hours the other day?
I’d love to celebrate Bloglines for its growth. In fact I’d love to PAY THEM $50 A MONTH for an account on a server that can handle that growth. I like the service and I want to depend on it – I wish they’d give me the chance!
(Note to Bloglines: Somewhere in the middle of all of this growth the “Plumber” stopped being funny. Please replace him with a regularly-updated status blog.)
I’m a relative newcomer to Bloglines and lurched into this problem before knowing there was a problem. The design of the site is so good though (for me, better than Newsgator Online, which I think is its only real online competition, but I’d be happy to be wrong), and it makes me so much more efficient than what I was using before (Newsgator Outlook) that I’m extremely reluctant to leave it.
The odd thing is that in my 100+ feeds, most are working as expected. It seems to be a very small subset of them with the lagging problem (and in one or two cases, not seeing any updates at all). Based on the limited description of the issue, I would have thought the problem would be more universal, but it appears not. How can one feed be Johnny-on-the-spot consistently while the other is dead to the world?
I wish Bloglines would update their site with a status, or at the very least see the return here of the Bloglines rep who’s posted on this site before. And as mentioned earlier, they need to make the location of their forum OBVIOUS. I would have posted this there but for all the tumbling tumbleweeds.
Rumor on the street is that the “doubling” in Bloglines readership some sites are seeing is due to Bloglines halving their polling rate for some sites (apparently yours among them) from 60 minutes to 30 minutes.