Who’s reading the blogsphere?

Labnotes blogged I’ve been following Robert Scoble’s comparison of the various blogsphere search engines. It was interesting to read what he found out, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found in the blog stats this morning.

This blog has been up for only a few short days. It shows up on technorati and bloglines, I added it there out of curiosity to see how fast they can track new posts. Technorati is back on track, and was very quick in adding one of my posts to the tags tag. I didn’t bother with the rest, but my blog does ping to ping-o-matic. That’s the default setup for Wordpress.

Right now, the search engine saturation is shown as 0 (zero, as in nada), meaning that Google, Yahoo and MSN don’t know it exists. Which is fine. But I am seeing spiders grabbing the feeds, from feedster, icerocket, blo.gs, syndic8, blogpulse, blogslive, topicblogs, and omni-explorer.

I may be wrong, but I think these additional spiders saw his site because of his pings to ping-o-matic

Now, here’s the interesting bit. The last three are future services. The omni-explorer site has this message:

Omni-Explorer is a venture-backed startup based in Silicon Valley. Stay tuned to this site; we plan on launching shortly. If you have found this page because of the Omni-crawler, please bear with us. We hope to be able to point many more users to the valuable content on your site shortly.

You’re with me? All these startups are building new services that know what’s going on in the blogsphere. They know about a blog that barely exists. And it’s not rocket science, you just need to listen to the pings. But all of that, and this post as well, goes under the radar of the big three.

P.S. And another cool use of technology. The last three spiders report their URL in user agent header, so the site name shows in my logs. That’s how I identified them. Leave clues and people will link back to you.

Update: The Googlebot trails the RSS spiders by three days.

The blogs to be spidered the fastest are Blogger.com (BlogSpot), because that is owned by Google, but it seems to pick up on the others pretty fast.

Update: Interesting entry about omni-explorer.