There I was, minding my own business, trying to expand my blog readership when the unthinkable happened!

“What happened?”, you might ask!

Well, before I tell you, let me take you back a few weeks to where the story really starts….

Regular readers know that I’ve recently been making a whole raft of improvements at John’s Tech Blog.  You’ve seen the changes, haven’t you?  New design, more respectful navigation, more regular (and I hope, better quality) posts for your entertainment.

If you owned your own blog, wouldn’t you want it to be more popular?  That’s certainly my desire for John’s Tech Blog, and that’s why I posted my “Fave This Blog” competition last week (read the post here).  The essence of that post was that I was offering a free ad for a reader chosen at random from my “Fans” page on Technorati.

Yesterday, I sat at my computer in my hotel room in Poland and wrote a post reminding everyone about the competition.  Oh, and that was before breakfast, too!

I was getting excited about the buzz, so today I clicked the bookmark for my Technorati page to see how everything was going.

I was anticipating the page loading.  I could already see in my mind what the page looked like and where I’d have to scroll to in order to see how many fans I had.

Do you know what I saw?

“Network Timeout”.

Network Timeout???

Yup – Network Timeout!  Technorati was down!

I’ve been monitoring it all day and there have been a variety of messages and obvious attempts to get it up and running again, but as of now, it’s dead!

I can picture the frantic scenes at Technorati HQ.  I can imagine the huge quantities of coffee and pizza that are keeping the technicians functioning whilst they try and fix things.  But they don’t know what I know….

Think about it – Technorati was running perfectly well until recently, but then something changed.  Do you know what that was?

I posted my competition!

That’s my theory – Technorati died as a direct result of my competition being announced.

OK, so maybe my ego needs a rest!  I hope the guys get the site up and running again soon.  They do a fantastic job and we bloggers are proud to be associated with them.

If the outage lasts too long, I may change the competition – watch this space….

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