A Brief Tribute to Dan Chan, Daypop, and MIT’s Blogdex

Apologies for being way late with this post.

It’s often easy to forget the pioneers in any area of history.

When it comes to web search or to be more specific blog and feed search, Dan Chan, creator of Daypop, was one of the very first to create a search tool for blogs and news. Well, time passes, new services come around, and users habits change. Now, a visit to Daypop shows a page saying the site is offline until further notice for a variety of reasons. A cached post from December, 2005 shows that the site was already offline then. Of course, we sincerely hope that Dan brings Daypop back soon. However, if he’s unable to get it going, it’s important not to forget the important and very useful work of this web search pioneer. Kudos Dan and thanks! Btw, we have contacted Dan to see if he can share more about Daypop’s future.

While we’re also mentioning other pioneering weblog/feed search and info tools, let’s not forget Blogdex. This service from MIT Media Lab went offline earlier this year but hopefully it will return soon. Blogdex was an early service to see how info traveled through the blogospere. We found an active cached page from January, 2006 and this page saying that the service will be back soon at Blogdex.net, a domain provided to Blogdex by Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia. We also find the same info at the old Blogdex URL.

Again, let’s hope these services return. If they don’t it’s still important to remember them as pioneers in weblog and feed search and diffusion info.

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