BlogRolling.com Over and Done With?

Does any­one use BlogRolling​.com any more?

I still see blog rolls all over the blo­gos­phere, but there isn’t as much atten­tion paid to them now as a year ago. More impor­tant­ly, BlogRolling​.com itself has changed.

If you keep an eye on BlogRolling​.com you’ll notice that, for the last four months, it’s been qui­et. Following its acqui­si­tion by soft­ware site Tucows​.com, the nor­mal­ly busy news page was stone silent from 14 May 2004 through 9 September 2004.

During that time appar­ent­ly noth­ing changed on BlogRolling​.com.

When the news did come back, it was to announce the migra­tion of the site to Tucows’ servers, tech­ni­cal prob­lems relat­ed there­to, and the fact that BlogRolling.com’s man­age­ment were com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to those issues for days.

Does the blo­gos­phere still need a ser­vice like BlogRolling​.com?

Should it be BlogRolling​.com, or is it time for a com­peti­tor to rise up?

Now that BlogRolling​.com is owned by the not-so-cool Tucows, BR does­n’t inspire the same warm and fuzzy brand loy­al­ty as it did as a one-man oper­a­tion start­ed as a labor of love. So, does the blo­gos­phere want BR to con­tin­ue even it man­ages to get its act together?

3 thoughts on “BlogRolling.com Over and Done With?”

  1. Neville Hobson

    “Does the blo­gos­phere still need a ser­vice like Blogrolling​.com?’ I’d say yes.

    The key bit in the ques­tion is “like Blogrolling”. The fias­co of the past 4 days will have done dam­age to Blogrolling’s rep­u­ta­tion; how they devel­op their cus­tomer rela­tion­ships in the com­ing weeks in par­tic­u­lar will be impor­tant in how those rela­tion­ships are maintained.

    It’s a com­pet­i­tive world and there are oth­er such ser­vices out there.

    Meanwhile, I’m goim­ng to give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt, at least for a while longer.

  2. Ross Rader

    All points well tak­en. Small point of cor­rec­tion though – we had migrat­ed the ser­vice to Tucows NOC at IBM many moons ago – that’s part of why things were so qui­et for so many months – things were rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble which let my dev team and I focus on what we want­ed to do with the next ver­sion of Blogrolling. We weren’t look­ing to come in and turn the ser­vice upside down from what Jason had built because he had done a pret­ty fine job of it.

    Last week’s events were regret­table and it will take us a lot of time to regain the trust of our users. But I think we’re up for to the task – hope­ful­ly we’ll be able to con­vince our cus­tomers of this before too long as well.

    Thanks for the track­back – as I men­tioned, all of your points are spot on and well appreciated.

  3. jim

    Spot on? Yes. Try to regain the trust of their users? Proving that they are alive and con­cerned with their users con­cerns would be help­ful in that case… And when is this new ver­sion com­ing out? It’s been months now and there is still noth­ing on the site about it. A tiny upgrade like chang­ing a user­name took months to get in place. Even if they do reim­pli­ment Paypal for Blogroll renew­al, it will be doubt­ful if I both­er to renew mine.

Comments are closed.