Son of a glitch

It has been a bit glitchy here on currybetdotnet over the last couple of days. Today my del.icio.us links didn't post automatically. At this distance it is difficult to tell whether that was a problem at their end, whether my server was down or unresponsive when del.icio.us tried, or whether there was some kind of special character in the package it sent that caused Movable Type to shy away from publishing.

It meant I had to put them in by hand today, which is why they were late, and who knows if they will all appear here again tomorrow. Apologies in advance if that happens.

I particularly wanted to publish them because I had bookmarked cabel.name's post that advertising URLs is dead in Japan. It has been bookmarked by hundreds of people, but I haven't seen anyone much question one of the central premises - namely that because of SEO spam this kind of thing couldn't take off in the USA. I thought that rather patronisingly assumed that there is no corresponding shady search engine marketing effort in Japan. Or indeed, maybe as John has pointed out in the comments here, it is because web URLs are so annoyingly not actually available without using some kind of Latin script, making them less effective than using Japanese keywords.

del.icio.us isn't the only service that has gone awol for me this week. I'm rather hoping that the statistics I got back from Feedburner yesterday were an error on their part, rather than an indication that my entire subscriber base has committed ritual suicide when faced with yet more posts about my trip to Macau...