j's scratchpad

In order to try to get the folks at QuackTrack/Blogshares to correct the name this blog is listed under in their service (reported earlier, especially in the comments), I had to join Blogshares. They only let members send them error reports. I still have no idea why I would want to do anything with that Web site. And I am still waiting for them to finish the process of me claiming my feed. It’s only been about twelve hours. I know I should just chill and sit on my hands, but instead, I’m going to write about how much easier and more sensical it is to claim a feed in Feedster than it is to do so in Blogshares, even if I haven’t been able to get Feedster’s feed claiming service to work for one of my blogs since claiming this feed a while ago. I’ve been ragging the Feedster guys pretty hard lately and they deserve a break. (No, I’m not sucking up for Feedster’s developers contest. Perhaps you’ve noticed I haven’t entered. Yet.)

Blogshares does a lot via e-mail. I’m not too crazy about that. When I registered for the site, I had to wait for them to send an e-mail before I could confirm registration and log in. When I tried to claim a blog, it e-mailed me to tell me I’m trying to claim a weblog. With Feedster, I just registered and went. And benefits of registering and claiming a feed are very tangible in Feedster: control over the feed in Feedster, stats, an image of my choice, etc. With Blogshares, I think I get $1000 in play money to spend on their stock market made of blogs and that might be it. I may not even be able to change the name of my blog myself or give it the correct URL for my blog’s feed. (Don’t get me wrong: I find humor in the idea behind Blogshares and I think it might be fun to tinker with, pretend to play the stock market, learn a smidge about investing, but it just doesn’t appeal to me and I just keep asking “Why?”)

Anyway, in order for me to prove I own a weblog, I have to post their logo on my site. When their spider next visits and sees the code for the logo, supposedly it will acknowledge that I own the site. That’s why their logo now appears on this blog. Unfortunately, I have no idea when their spider might visit next. It could arrive tonight. It could be here next month. Their spiders don’t show up in my referer logs. I wonder if blogs marked for claiming get put on a list to get spidered fairly quickly. I think the entire process in Feedster took about ten minutes. I can’t remember how Feedster let me know my efforts to claim this feed were successful, but I think it was pretty clear.

I have no idea when I’ll know when Blogshares visits my blog and/or acknowledges that this blog is mine. Maybe they’ll send me another e-mail. When I logged into the site a few minutes ago, it told me I had no blogs. To claim a blog, I needed to enter a URL. When I entered this blog’s URL, it told me I had a claim already for this weblog. I felt like I went in a circle. It would be easier if the page telling me I have no weblogs told me which weblogs I was trying to claim and what the status of the claim was.

I should add, too, that I still have not been able to get my blog to show up in their search results successsfully, no matter which name I use for it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.