The RSS Blog

More and more, I see people reporting how many total links Technorati, IceRocket, PubSub and BlogPulse have found that point to their blog. These numbers are utterly meaningless. The important number is how many new links you are finding with these tools. Technorati, for instance, is always finding 2 month old links for me. That's just great! PubSub, on the other hand, is great at finding false positive links. BlogPulse is really good at finding links from and to my own blog. And they are all counting a lot of duplicates when those numbers are tallied. I've decided, a new experiment is in order. I'm gonna write down how I find new links. So, please link to this article, so I can write them down ;-) 

List of finds

1. http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=128 on IceRocket, KBCafe, PubSub (late), BlogPulse (late)
2. http://www.lllj.net/blog/archives/2005/08/05/getting-back-into-the-saddle/ on Bloglines, PubSub (late), IceRocket (late)
3. http://www.kenlee.cn/index.php?articleid=a_20050805_235959 on Bloglines, BlogPulse (late), KBCafe (late)
4. http://www.ahknight.net/archives/2005/08/05/dailylink-2005-08-05/ on Bloglines, IceRocket (late), KBCafe (late), PubSub (late), BlogPulse (late)
5. http://vega.cs.tku.edu.tw/~u8197228/blog/item/640 on Bloglines
6. http://feeds.feedburner.com/raenoll?m=295 on Bloglines, PubSub (late)
7. http://www.livejournal.com/users/ga_woo/18931.html on Bloglines, PubSub, IceRocket, BlogPulse, KBCafe (late)
8. http://blog.ch/blog/index.php/archives/2005/08/05/alle-dienstleistungen-von-blogch-auf-einen-blick/#comments on Bloglines, IceRocket (late), KBCafe (late)
9. http://ejohn.org/blog/mailing-list-feeds/ on Bloglines, IceRocket, KBCafe, Technorati (late), PubSub (late)
10. http://feeds.feedburner.com/Incomplete?m=165 on Bloglines, PubSub, BlogPulse, KBCafe
11. http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog?m=1021 on Bloglines
12. http://www.psotd.com/posts/1123277442.shtml on Bloglines, PubSub, BlogPulse, KBCafe (late)
13. http://www.nitworks.com/131/is-google-behind-this/ on PubSub, IceRocket, BlogPulse, KBCafe (late)
14. http://kadasseril.blogspot.com/2005/08/kbcafe.html on PubSub
15. http://blog.lazytom.com/2005/08/its-about-finding-new-links.html on IceRocket, KBCafe (late)
16. http://blogfresh.blogspot.com/2005/08/new-links-or-old.html on IceRocket, BlogPulse, Technorati, KBCafe (late)
17. http://www.surfarama.com/index.php?p=212 on Bloglines, Technorati (late)

Standings

1. Bloglines - 12 finds
2. KBCafe - 11 finds (8 late find)
3. PubSub - 10 finds (5 late finds)
4. IceRocket - 9 find (3 late finds)
5. BlogPulse - 8 finds (3 late finds)
6. Technorati - 3 finds (2 late find) 
7. Feedster - 0

Notes

• Bloglines is by far the slowest front-end. 
• I'm defining a late find as a find, but more than one hour later than the original find. These are also valuable, but let's say half as valuable.
• Friday night I went camping (no wifi), just returned Sunday night.
• PubSub finds a lot of false positives, duplicates and doesn't point to the blog entry, but rather the blog. Very frustration and not very helpful.
• IceRocket and KBCafe were the only to find both links left by readers. BlogPulse and Technorati got 1 of 2 and everybody else zero.
• I tweaked KBCafe on Monday, to better capture results, that's why the big number of late finds.
• I forgot Blogdigger. They are reporting 0 finds in that timeframe.