intertwingly

Sam,
Federation might be very cool indeed, particularly if we can associate 'ping subscriptions' with the 'events' sent as RSS snippets. Say for example, I ran an internet 3 weblog and wanted to add a post you made to this blog,  and some third guy wants to add to a community topic forum. If you could associatee a subscription based on category, or some property of the post item, this could be done at the ping server, between the ping servers set up for these purposes. This would unify the use of pinging with trackback at the cost of some centralization. (Ofcourse, subscriptions could be done peer-peer too, but then the pinging, weblog.com style is less useful)

I think that the "pinging" problem sounds like a good candidate for a P2P-like implementation. Currently, everybody pings a couple of sites, and if you want to track your favorite weblogs, you have to contact these same sites repeatedly, thus leading to an insane amount of traffic. I think this is definitely a poor solution, especially for a service (blogging) which is supposed to be fully decentralized. Instead, each time you publish a new story, you could "ping" all the weblogs in your blogroll. And every weblog in your blogroll would notify all the sites in their blogroll. Etc. Or, obviously, something more optimized based on some form of publish/subscribe. Some sites would end up acting as "supernodes" because they're in everybody's blogroll, but at least alternate paths would exist. And you could be notified about new posts in near-real-time.

What you're describing would create an insane amount of network traffic, and would amount to a distributed denial-of-service attack on A-list bloggers (since they are, by definition, on so many people's blogrolls).  If I'm on your blogroll along with 20 other people, and I'm also on each of their blogrolls, a simple 2-depth ping algorithm would result in my getting pinged 21 times every time you updated.

Repeat after me:

1. Thanks
2. I don't care
3. I don't care
4. I don't care
5. I don't care
6. I don't care
7. I don't care
8. I don't care
9. I don't care
10. I don't care
11. I don't care
12. I don't care
13. I don't care
14. I don't care
15. I don't care
16. I don't care
17. I don't care
18. I don't care
19. I don't care
20. I don't care
21. I don't care

This could be solved via the inverse of some long term "popularity index" used as a probability to ping each blog. Essentially as if I said "Nah, I won't ping Sam, he probably already knows it".

So that the probability of any given blog pinging an A-list blog would be small.

The "popularity index", in such a scheme, could be derived from the number of pings a blog receives, maybe scaled through an "I don't care" configurable factor, thus keeping traffic small. ;-)

OTOH, it shouldn't be necessary to notify everybody in your blogroll each time you post, but maybe only a random subset of them. If everybody then notifies a random subset of their own blogroll, things should spread around pretty fast. Kinda like Gnutella clients: you don't send search queries to every single Gnutella node out there, only to a smal selection: your direct peers. Your requests are then forwarded around the mesh.

A federation, huh? Does that mean I have to consort with some very ugly dude with a bumpy face and bad attitude?

Whilst its great that Dave is upgrading the hardware running weblogs.com, I've never seen the term federated used to mean what Dave describes. It appears that I'm not the only one. BTW, blogping.root will let you ping from Radio an additional ping ...

Pingback from Simon Fell > Its just code : Monday, March 17, 2003

seems to me that nntp might have some applicability here. i recall that it did an okay job of flood-filling a set of servers with information from individuals.

(and yes, dave seems to have a very odd definition of federated.)

Weblog ping servers seem to be multiplying and there is not as much effort to cooperate as there might be. So, since Julian Bond suggested it, and I wanted to play with POE anyway, I wrote up "fan-out" server of the type he describes. Then Jim...