I heard about BlogRovr over on WTC and thought I would give it a try.
It seemed like a good idea, I took some screenshots while setting it up and was going to write a lengthy post about it today.
I was honestly quite excited, as I find various kinds of meme trackers extremely useful.
WTC actually highlighted Techmeme in their title – I actually much prefer to use custom Megite memes such as this one on SEO and I get it updated all the time on a Google Toolbar button.
BlogRovr might be a good idea, but is limited to only 100 sites.
Add a Zero
The idea of meme trackers is to be able to handle more information than you could otherwise cope with in a Feed Reader. A limit of 100 is absolutely useless for any serious use.
Increase that number to 1000 and I might be interested in taking a deeper look at it and maybe giving a recommendation.
If you can’t handle the data, invest in bigger servers, or limit your beta to fewer people.
8 Comments
I was going to try BlogRovr but apparently my e-mail address isn’t real enough.
I’m not sure if it is because it’s a .co.uk instead of a .com but I decided not to try any others. That put me off enough not to bother.
Hey thanks for trying us out. Not sure what the problem you encountered was, but I suspect that you may have missed the admittedly somewhat small pagination numbers at the bottom of the page, that would take you to see your more than 100 blogs.
Andrew, I don’t think we even use your email address, so that must not have been the problem. Both of you are welcome to write me at marc at activeweave.com to help get set up if you like. cheers,
marc meyer, ceo activeweave
Wow, I’m glad to have made your favorites…I kinda thought you didn’t like me.
Take care,
Paula
Marc
I first of all tried with a larger opml file, and it imported only the first 100 items.
I then cut the opml in half, and only entered the second section for import.
The system didn’t import the new OPML addresses.
It wasn’t a case of pagination, on the second page I still have the few sites that were assigned by my browsing habits (which wasn’t very accurate, I am not sure where you get that data from)
You definitely seem to have a hard limit of 100 user submitted items via OPML and splitting the opml into chunks doesn’t help.
Hey Andy,
Good point, and it’s a deal! We just added one more zero, indeed: try us out, and give me more of your feedback.
For the record, it’s even better than that: we never had any limitation on how many blogs Rovr fetches for you: you could always, and still can, feed us as many feeds as you want, not just 100 or 1,000.
The only limitation (just now bumped to 1,000) is on how many entries we’ll ingest when you submit an OPML file: we only take in 1,000 entries at a time. Why? We do quite a bit of validation on incoming feeds, and that can become quite lengthy: we didn’t want to go away for 2 hours and let our users worry we’d lost their list!
The last thing we want is be perceived as elitist, and you are absolutely correct: the whole point is for you to give us your list of favorite blogs, then forget about us until we find a post that covers the page you’re on.
@Andrew:
Argh, what a shameful, basic bug! My apologies to you and just about half the population with an email address. Thanks for pointing this out, actually. We just fixed the offending piece of Javascript (make sure you do a full refresh of the page!), and your email address should now be good enough for us! Sorry about that.
Marc has just informed me that the limit has been lifted to 1000 feeds in one import request.. Haven’t tried it myself yet… Will do.. Lets see how it works for a larger sum.
Hi Andy, You mentioned that if we added a zero you might take another look and even give a recommendation. Well, we realized you were right and added a zero that same day, 3 weeks ago. We had worried people would have to wait for a long time for their long opml files, but saw it your way the moment you pointed it out. So, how about revisiting your opinion on our elitism?
We’re committed to making blogrovr an increasingly useful best friend for people reading blogs, to help you find out all you really want to know from those you care about, as well as a way for blog authors to reach out to a wide and interested audience. Some of our tech top choices are getting an additional 5-6k readers from readers opting into our recommended tech bundle, for example.
I hope you try us again, and we’re always open and reactive to suggestions for improving your experience.
Yours,
Marc
Hi Marc
I am testing it all the time
You will also notice in my next post in about 20 seconds that I am building up an OPML file that is actually worth testing it with.
200 listings on some content seems to be overkill, when it is something everyone is talking about.
If it is something not being talked about, with the exact terms or tagging, I am not getting much in the way of related content.
I am not sure whether that is the fault of the software, or the way many SEO blogs don’t understand and use tagging.
Once I have some data I will certainly get back to you.
There was also a little bit of delay, because for some reason it wasn’t picking up data – I think you guys were arawe of that, because after a couple of relatively fast updates things fixed themselves.
I am sure top bloggers are doing great being in the default lists, that seems to happen with every service.
As an example I seem to remember John Batelle has 10,000 Rojo subscribers listed, and I had just one last time I checked my Feedburner stats.
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[...] BlogRovr is a personalized meme tracker that sure is a unique go at this market. But it has a lacking, it is limited to 100 sites only. The idea of any Blog Trackers is to be able to track thousands of [...]
[...] is a purpose to this, I needed an OPML file of like minded people to do some additional testing of Blogrovr. An OPML of around 200 sites just wasn't enough, and I wanted interesting sites on varied [...]
[...] results will be but the reviews I’ve read so far are not encouraging. Andy called it “elitist” but didn’t qualify his [...]