One of the most important and accepted blog counter services in Germany is closing. Blogscout.de was a very valuable public blogosphere-meter to find out what is going on and what is hot at the moment. On September 30th 2007 the servers will be disconnected and all collected data will be deleted on September 15th. The service and the database will not be sold. Every blog owner using blogscout.de must delete the code until then to avoid page performance delays.

Interesting is the fact that blogscout.de is NOT closing down because of counter issues but because of missing the personal goals of the founder Dirk Olbertz. He wanted to give the German blogosphere a non-commercial quality signpost (Wegweiser) to see where the subjects are heading at the moment. The quantity statistics, counting page impressions and all the other numbers, was a nice side effect but never the personal goal of Dirk. He says that he totally missed the Long Tail, all the small underrepresented blogs, and instead blogscout.de, because of its public nature, became a kind of marketing hit list.

Blog announcement: Blogscout.de wird geschlossen