Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo
Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo - very interesting news. Back in March 2003 Dave Winer blogged that perhaps there should be a search engine based off data in RSS feeds. Three people started coding that weekend, Greg Gershman, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte, forming BlogDigger, Roogle, and RSS-Search.
Scott’s “Roogle” launched by Mondayish, was Slashdotted to death, and and became Feedster. Scott and François both decided to make a company out of their ventures, and realizing that they lived in Boston, merged into Feedster. Greg later incorporated BlogDigger, but didn’t take quite the same route. I became online friends with them all to varying degrees, got to intern at Feedster in 2005, and also met Greg during that time. Although it never really attained the prestige that Feedster did, BlogDigger was always cool to me. Greg added searching by category (now generally called tags these days) thanks to my suggestion. His geo-based search is pretty nice, despite the fairly small number of geocoded blogs.
Feedster is 404ing these days, later PubSub died. Technorati eventually added searching to their backlink features, but they are struggling to some extent these days. The likes of Google Blogsearch hardly help. At any rate, Greg hung in there, and it is great to see it living on even further, and I hope him the best at his new job.
