I started trying out Bloglines about a week ago.  What I liked about it was the way I could publish my list of the blogs I'm reading. To me, this list is key.  It has taken me a year or so to filter and hone it so that I'm reading stuff I'm interested in.  The other cool thing is that you can see how many other bloglines users have subscribed to a particular  feed.  Of course, I subscribed to my own blog, just because.  I noticed that 15 other people had also, probably for lesser reasons.

So the other day, I noticed that my blog had been removed from my list!  I didn't do this!  I assure you, I read my own blog all the time!  So I re-subscribed.  Now bloglines says that there's only 1 person subscribed to my blog.  Me!  So did everyone un-subscribe since last week?   Or, did the record and all FKs for my blog get deleted?   Was this an accident?  Am I being silenced?  I know that Microsoft is probably pretty worried about my WSMQ project taking market share from MSMQ but I doubt they'd do anything so sneaky. ;)

Of course I'm not really that paranoid, but this does point out a potential problem when using these hosted blog readers.  You're putting your library of feeds in someone else's hands, and anything could happen.  If an obscure blog like my own was deleted from my list, I may not ever even know it was gone!  Even worse it may take me years to get those 15 people back!

-Brendan