weblogs.com

Back in the day, when the net was young, there were newsgroups, or NNTP. It was the predecessor of the online message boards. But unlike message boards, where a centralized website held the information, newsgroup postings were fowarded from site to site.

It worked pretty well, but eventually became useless because of the lack of access controls: every newsgroup became just spam, trolls, porn, and hate.

It still exists, both as a protocol and as a system. (Check out heavily filtered versions at groups.google.com or news.gmane.org.) But, its raw form is useless. The good-info-to-crap ratio is too low.

It is sad to see that weblogs.com has suffered the same fate. Most new postings are to spamlogs. It, too, is drowning.

Spike's Law: "Any website that has a public API will become useless."

I used to enjoy the randomness of reading new blog entries. When I checked it out today, I had to click through forty entries before I finally found a good, old fashioned, blog with cat pictures.