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.
I can always count on you to know which irrelevant company acquired which other irrelevant company, with a list of other relevant irrelevant companies.
your normally pseudooffensive comments are closer to actually offensive, matt. we are talking about my friends and their actually excellent sites
No worries Matt. I really don’t mean to toot my own horn, or Michael horn, but the sites that you use now, like Google, were heavily influenced by startups that in some cases crashed and burned and you’ll never know existed. Just cuz we didn’t get bought out by Google or Yahoo doesn’t mean we didn’t move things along. Dave Winer has put out so many ideas that have pushed things along, and he gets little credit. Michael and I have had a much smaller role to play, but definitely not irrelevant.
Anyway, thanks for the mention Michael, and for your thoughts and ideas over the years. Reminds me of the song, “When I was seventeen….” Only it’s you, not me. 😉
Matt: haha you should have made it clear I wasn’t being serious.. Ican’t say anything.. that woudl break character
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(that sentence was not proof-read)