I am here in the Zoho data center. I’m hanging out with Kris of Zooomr who is working on getting Zooomr back up. I am entertaining the hoardes that are hanging out in the chat room.

He is working on getting Zooomr back up. The machines are coming back up. Zooomr’s photos are back online — if you have one on a blog it isappearing again but the service is not up yet.

UPDATE: It is about 2 a.m., everything looks good for a reboot. I am driving Kristopher home and he will get some sleep and then later today (Saturday in California) he will work to get the site restarted. Looks like Zooomr will come back online.

Raj from Zoho is also here, he has been helping out a lot and putting in his own time to help Zooomr get restarted.

There is a lot that I am learning about data centers. There are hundreds of Google computers surrounding the Zoho cage. I wish I could take pictures in here (they don’t allow photography). But I’m even more impressed with Google now that I have seen a small part of their data center infrastructure.

Also, many companies have given Kristopher some help. Dell kicked but to fix the server. Sun loaned a Thumper with 48 hard drives. And another company donated servers — they didn’t want to be named but they are nice servers.

Raj gave me a little tour and explained the different kind of equipment in here. I wish I could videotape inside a datacenter and give you a look. These are amazing places — I’m staring at about 30 racks of Google computers, each with 40 computers inside. I can literally feel the heat from your searches!

Anyway, that’s all from the Zoho datacenter.

Looking at my referers from yesterday (WordPress shows me where traffic comes from and where they came from) I see that the largest group comes from Google Reader. I was on TechMeme twice yesterday and the fact that I got twice as much traffic from Google Reader than from TechMeme is pretty significant.

The other thing this demonstrates is that the most engaged audiences are now using Google Reader. What do I mean by “engaged?” People who are willing to do something. Click a link. Leave a comment. Buy. Etc.

Engaged audiences are the ones that advertisers and big companies are looking to reach.

Is Google sitting on a gold mine? My referer logs say yes.

Back in 2002 I was director of marketing for UserLand Software. You know, Dave Winer’s company. In January of 2002 we shipped Radio UserLand. It was pretty darn bleeding edge for its time. It had a built-in Web server. A built-in database. A built-in RSS aggregator. That let me read feeds in a river-of-news format. It even worked offline (I used it back then to read feeds on plane rides and I could write blog posts while in a plane and sync them up when back online).

This week Google Gears came out and Google’s Reader has offline capabilities.

Hmmm, I swear I’ve seen this all before. Thanks to Dave Winer for providing the roadmap to Google. Bummer that we didn’t make any money off of it, but it’s nice to see that Dave’s ideas, if not his implementation, continues to prove interesting in 2007.