Daypop

» see daypop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed daypop. by the time it would have mattered, around 2002 to 2004, i was an undergrad on ttnet running msn and the occasional ultima online private server, not running rss subscriptions or tracking the early-blogosphere conversation. for whatever reason daypop was a category of tool you only opened if you had already invested in feeds and blogs as a media diet. i hadn't.

dan chan started daypop in late 2000 from hong kong, where he was living and writing in his own blog during the us presidential election. anyway, the gap he saw was that no existing search engine indexed blogs or news at the cadence the blogosphere was producing them. google news did not exist yet. technorati had not launched. the early blogs were spinning up content faster than any general-purpose crawler was visiting them.

the daypop solution was narrow and direct. anyway, dan crawled rss feeds and news sites at higher frequency than a general crawler would, then indexed the results for keyword search. the additional layer on top was the daypop top 40, a list of which links were being cited most across blogs in the last day. for whatever reason that was the metric that made daypop matter for a couple of years. it surfaced what the blog conversation was actually about, in something close to real time.

by 2003 daypop was getting honorable mentions in the search engine watch awards for two years running. the mit technology review profiled the service. infotoday did a writeup. for the early-blogosphere community, daypop was the standard tool for figuring out which posts were spreading and which stories were getting picked up. then technorati grew, then google blog search launched in september of 2005. anyway, daypop fell behind.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it did ~

the daypop interface was bare. anyway a search box on a white background, a clickable top 40 list of trending links, a top news list, a top word cloud (or whatever it was called). the design was 2001 web. dan never spent much time on layout. the appeal was that the index was current and the metric was useful.

in those days the technical setup ran on dan's own hardware in his own apartment for the first few years. anyway when he moved cities in late 2002 the service went offline for a couple of weeks while the box was in transit. for whatever reason that downtime was the first public signal that daypop was a one-person operation with no redundancy.

~ the one-man problem ~

this part is the standard story for a single-operator project. anyway dan kept daypop running on his free time, kept the index fresh, kept the top 40 algorithm tuned. for whatever reason by 2005 the demands of crawling the rapidly growing blogosphere were outpacing what one person could maintain on the side.

in those days technorati had a team and venture funding and was running a similar service at higher scale. google launched a blog-search product in september of 2005 with the full google infrastructure behind it. daypop kept running but the index updates slowed. the top 40 became less current. for whatever reason the service did not so much shut down as get left running in a state that no longer matched what users needed (close enough).

~ the next chapter ~

by mid-2006 daypop was effectively dead. anyway search engine watch published the obituary on august 17 of '06 under the title so long daypop and blogdex, pairing it with the mit blog tracker that died around the same time. for whatever reason neither service had a formal shutdown announcement. they just stopped updating.

in those days daypop's contribution is that it figured out the trending-link metric before anyone else. anyway the top 40 idea, which posts are being cited most across the blogosphere in the last day, became the foundation for technorati's popularity ranking and later for any number of trending-news products. the daypop interface is gone. the daypop algorithm is everywhere now.

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