Day: March 2, 2003

After a long hiatus, the Blogosphere Ecosystem has returned to TTLB. You can find it here, in all its glorious silliness.
This time around, I did it right: it’s fully automated, executing once a day in the early morning using PHP scripts and storing all the results in a MySQL database. And it incorporates some of the basic concepts of the Weblog MetaData Initiative — when it scans a blog, it not only gathers links, but also grabs WMDI tags (if they are there) and allows users browsing the Ecosystem to see them. My hope is that the Ecosystem will encourage interest in WMDI — both from folks willing to add WMDI tags to their weblogs, and from folks interested in directly participating in the development of WMDI standards and tools.
As an homage to the original Ecosystem, I took the list of weblogs from Instapundit and VodkaPundit‘s blogrolls — which was how the original was created. This time around I also added in Bill Quick‘s list, as he’s got a darned comprehensive one himself. This naturally gives the TTLB Ecosystem a very political-blog slant in general, and warblogger slant in particular. Depending on how popular the new version becomes, we may see it branch out into the wider Blogosphere, or perhaps it will remain focused on the political zone. Either is fine by me.
Take a look, sign up to have your weblog scanned if it isn’t being scanned already, and if you want to make a bear really happy, add WMDI tags to your blog.
And remember: the Ecosystem is for amusement purposes only. No wagering!

Well folks, the move is done. I’ve tried to check everything; all seems to be well. But if you notice anything wiggy, please drop me a line and point it out (or just comment on this post).
Special thanks goes to Erica over at for her suggestion on how to change my archiving strategy, and for goading me into making my pages PHP-ready.
-NZB