“Why Is Weblogs.com Ignoring Us?”

It seems that since sometime in March or very early April, weblogs.com stopped listing updates to my site, and lots of the sites in my buddy list. Specifically, the sites that run on Conversant.

weblogs.com is a sort of "weblog tracking service." When your site is updated, you send a "ping" (usually automatically, but you can do it manually, too) to the weblogs.com server. The ping just tells it the name of the site that has been updated, and the site's URL. weblogs.com then checks to make sure it really has been updated, and then adds a link to the long list of weblogs updated during that hour. There are two versions of the update list: one for people to read in html format, and one for applications (like blogshares) to read in XML format.

It even maintains archives, so you can go back to see what sites were updated, and when.

I've debugged the pings we're sending, repeatedly. The server always returns the "thanks for the ping" response that indicates the ping was received successfully. Yet, our sites are never listed. The same is true for pings I've sent manually. It appears to be accepting the pings and then ignoring or forgetting them.

The service is run by Dave Winer. I wrote to Dave on May 6th to find out if he knew about the problem. No response. I wrote again on May 8th. Still no response. I wrote again this morning. Still no response.

This afternoon I mentioned the problem to Greg, so he ran test of his own. As expected, his site wasn't listed on weblogs.com, even an hour later.

Since I know the pings are going through correctly, and Dave is ignoring my email, I'm concluding that we're being intentionally ignored. Why, though? I haven't a clue. Is it something personal against me? Something technical about Conversant that he doesn't like? (Then why didn't he inform me?) Is it some business consideration? (I can't imagine what that could be, since Dave isn't in business right now.)

Here's at least a partial list of the sites that are being ignored:

• AnimalRights.net
• b.cognosco
• Brian Carnell
• Crusty Cassette
• Duncan's Jotter
  
• Greg's Home Space
• Have Browser, Will Travel
• Information Research Weblog
• Ruminations
• Thom's "A Weblog"
• Truer Words
• Waking Up Costs

Being ignored by weblogs.com isn't the end of the world, but there are a number of blog tracking and categorization systems (including Blogshares) that using its changes.xml files in the heart of their applications. Not being listed means we basically fall off the radar.

Unfortunately, I'm at a loss for how to handle this. I tried to handle it privately, three times, to no avail. What should I do next?

(Compare this situation with four years ago. When weblogs.com was rewritten for performance reasons, Truer Words was one of Dave's favorite sites. He included this site in a special group of favorite sites that weblogs.com continued to check until such time as we started sending automated pings to the server.)