Dirk Deppey gets to the bottom of what’s happened to the invaluable Comic Weblog Updates page, which has been out of service for more than a week now. It seems Yahoo!, which owns the blog-tracking Blo.gs, has changed how that site functions.
I don’t pretend understand the ins and outs of it, but judging from what Deppey’s learned, it looks like the Updates page — and others like it — has gone the way of the dodo, at least for now. Dirk has a fuller, and more informed, explanation.
The Comic Weblog Updates page has been an important part of the comics blogosphere for more than three years now, and is at least partly responsible for its growth, as it allowed readers and other bloggers to discover new sites and, obviously, see when those sites have been updated.
I wonder how the Updates page’s absence has affected traffic for those blogs listed? I finally shifted to Bloglines a month or so ago, so I don’t use the page like I used to, but I imagine its absence has left more than a few readers adrift, or at least inconvenienced.
December 18th, 2006 at 10:15 am
I’m totally about Google Reader myself as an alternative as I like the ability to collapse all the entries and easily clip those that I’m going to use for linkblogging, etc.
December 18th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I think traffic to my site has gone down since the Comic Weblog Updates page stopped working. There was a noticable bump in my traffic every time I posted (or rather, every time I pinged), and there is no similar bump when I post now.
Which is fine for me, actually. I’ve gotten linked to enough by the higher profile sites that I’ve got regular readers. It really sucks for the next blogger, who doesn’t have an audience yet, because it just gets that much harder to get noticed.
Which is kind of why I miss “Meanwhile…” In the void of the crippled Comic Weblog Updates page, Blog@Newsarama is, I think one of the few sites that could really act as the spine of the ComicsWebLogoSphere. I know it’s a lot of work that’s already claimed two custodians, but it’s a great way of building the community.
December 18th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
I know my traffic has gone down since Chipper (Oh, all right, the CWU) went bye-bye. Or maybe it’s just because nobody gives a hoot about my site anymore. No, I think it’s the CWU outage. I hope. Anyway, that was the main way I kept up with a lot of the sites I read regularly, so I miss it- just don’t have the time and patience to go through and select all the sites on something like Google Reader. Lazy, perhaps. C’est la vie. Guess I’ll just have to use my links list, the old fashioned way.
Wish someone could come up with an alternative! It definitely puts a crimp in that loose community that the Comics Blogosphereiverse has become, mostly because of the CWU.
December 18th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Aw man. I second the request to bring back the Meanwhile weekly blogosphere roundup feature. If someone on your team were looking at the rest/longtail of the comicsblogosphere instead of just cross-pollinating with other A-Listers, then there would have been a chance that maybe *I* would have gotten credit on the 13th for explaining to the blogosphere what happened to Comic Weblog Updates:
http://www.neilalien.com/doc/archive/2006/12/index.html#a13
Signed, Neilalien’s Jealous Sock Puppet and Advertising Service
December 18th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Ah, this sucks. I’d kept meaning to submit my site to this thing, and now I figure it’s too late.
My site does decent traffic, I guess, but I’m always looking for ways to increase it. I’ve been working an “If you build it, they will come” blogging model, but we all know that doesn’t always work.
December 18th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Hmmmmm…
December 18th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
hmmm?
December 18th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Hmmmm … !
December 19th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
Gotta love three-part harmony in your comments section!
January 11th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Has anyone seen this page?
http://blo.gs/cloud.php
January 24th, 2007 at 10:30 am
I have a new page up that does about the same thing: http://www.talesfromthelongbox.com/weblog-updates/