Tomotiki.com was a blog aggregator. It had four seperate aggregators actually: Kuwait Blogs, Saudi Blogs, Cooking Blogs, and Ubuntu Linux Blogs.
Kuwait Blogs was the most popular site, generating over 4000 visits a day. For a trip down memory lane and to see the site again you can visit the
Web Archive.
Tomotiki was forcefully closed by a takedown action. I could've contested the action and reopened it in less than a day (by mentioning that its an RSS reader) but I decided not to reopen it.
The reasons Tomotiki will remain closed are the following:
The main reason is the nudity and semi nudity which appears through the many blogs that are indexed, along with all the religious and political views that may or may not contradict with what I believe in.
Secondly, even though many bloggers email me daily to add their blogs to the website (it generates traffic to their blogs), I have had some complaints (and public threats and takedown actions), that I illegally steal other people's content. Obviously those people never heard of Google Reader or RSS.
The third reason is that the technology I use (which is basically WordPress with RSS plug-ins), is not suitable to handle as many blogs as I needed (I index of 100s of blogs).
That's why I have forwarded the domain to my blog.
I apologize if I didn't add your blog in time. I also apologize if you are used to read the blogs on Tomotiki and found that it disappeared. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.
Moving forward, I hope to find a solution for the main three points above. Namely, filter unwanted extreme posts, make sure all blogs are indexed with the approval/request of their owners, find a better platform to manage the aggregation process.
In the mean time I hope I can find a way to use google reader (or any web RSS reader) to index the list of blogs previously available on Tomotiki.
The lesson i learned from this project: The technology is ready but the people are not.