Blog Buzz Machine (BBM) started as an experiment in programming. I wanted to learn XML-RPC, so I got it in my head to create a little ping server. Blogs could enter my ping servers URL into their interface and let me know whenever they updated their funny blogs. It was a happy time…for a while.

Then the deluge happened, folks begat folks who begat blogs who pinged the ever loving crap out of little BBM. And to make matters better (or worse) the uber awesome Feedburner service added us to their PingShot service letting us know when folks updated their blogs. It reached such a fevered pitch that I had to shut down the service to only folks coming through Feedburner, for sadly I didn’t have the infrastructure to process the sheer volume of blog pings coming into to BBM.

Amazon’s EC2 service brought life back into little BBM. The scalable service is allowing me to start instances, collect ping data and do all sorts of things that I couldn’t do when I started Blog Buzz.

So what’s this thing all about you may ask? Well, at this point BBM’s going to collect a whole lot of pings, and I plan to munge through the data hopefully spitting out some interesting data on the blogosphere as a whole. If you’ve added us through Feedburners PingShot service, much thanks. If you haven’t then why don’t you? It’s simple to do and doesn’t cost you a penny.