Vale eWeek’s BlogSeeker

eWeek’s BlogSeeker blog tracking service, a service nearly everybody reading this post would have never heard of (and herein lies the problem) is apparently no more.

Following a tip, I visited BlogSeeker to find that nothing on the site has been updated in over two months, with most of the content on the front page going back to March. The really odd thing about this service, if it ever really existed as an ongoing concern, is that it doesn’t exist in Google…or Yahoo, or even Technorati (outside of the page itself), and that’s how far I went in trying to find more about it. It’s like it never actually launched, or if it, eWeek has tried to scrub every reference to it. In fact the only links into it were some stray eWeek posts where an ad for BlogSeeker was hard coded into the posts itself and must have been too hard for eWeek to remove.

There’s also an interesting twist: the project would appear to be linked in some way to Steve Gillmor. As well as appearing as the featured blogger on the front page of BlogSeeker, the demise of BlogSeeker would appear to be around the same time as Gillmor stopped blogging for eWeek here. A failed Gillmor project perhaps? I asked FSG for comment and all I got was something about mesh and Al Capone, so that didn’t solve the mystery.

One person pointed out to me that this is yet another example of a traditional media outfit trying to break into blog tracking and failing so badly that no one noticed. Despite this being a rational conclusion, I think that if Steve Gillmor was involved that it could never be as clear cut as that and that the real reason would be far more complicated, something that I, as a mere mortal, could not understand. So be it. Either way, BlogSeeker joins the mai dodopool.