Hello from the SonicMountain Team

Hello:

Welcome to Odeo and the first Blog update from the team at SonicMountain. My name is Eric Rupert and I am the COO at SonicMountain and the person responsible for assembling the technical team and managing the improvements to Odeo.

I would like to update you on some of the improvements that we have been working on since completion of the acquisition 12 days ago.

You should now notice that the feed crawler is back online. During the 6 weeks or so prior to the closing of the acquisition, the feed crawler was taken offline due to technical issues affecting performance of the site. Immediately following the acquisition, we made some adjustments and turned the feed crawler on again to start refreshing the feeds. Within 48 hours or so, the feed crawler began to again impact site performance. We immediately began working on other options and over the next two weeks or so, you will notice that feeds are being updated, however, at a slower rate. We have throttled the crawler temporarily while we work to test the modifications that will allow the crawler to scale to meet the increasing demand from the growing user base as well as increasing volumes of new content.

We know that the feed engine is a critical component to the system and is the primary concern of podcast creators. We have seen many requests recently in the ticket system for "when will my feed be updated". Let me assure you, we are focusing our attention on the feed engine and will continue to work on it to ensure that each feed is updated in a timely manner.

Several people have asked, "What happened to AudioBlogger"? Several months ago, the team at ODEO went through a mandatory IP renumbering at the colo facility. As a byproduct, the AudioBlogger system, ceased to function. While the application is not working, the data is there and we are rapidly working on a fix that involves bringing the audio content into the main Odeo database and setting up a responder from Odeo to respond to requests for audioblogger content. What this means is that your current blogs with embedded audio will begin to function again. We have not made a definitive decision on whether to try to resurrect AudioBlogger or to just preserve the existing content. I would like to hear from you about it.

If you are an IE-7 user and not signed in to the site, you may have noticed that you have to first "click to activate this control" before pressing the play button to listen to content on the site. We realize that this is confusing and is unfortunately a byproduct of IE7. If you have an account on the system and are logged in, content will "auto-play" when you reach the page. We are currently working on making the behavior common for both types of visitors.

In the coming weeks we will be unveiling a new search tool that will give you access to not only the Odeo site contents but also, up-to-the-minute content at many sites around the web.

Stay Tuned and please feel free to send suggestions on how to enhance the ODEO experience to eric@odeo.com

Posted by Eric Rupert at 5/21/2007