According to Bloglines, my online newsfeed aggregator, the 34 bloggers in my list of Canadian blogs have written a prodigious 631 blog posts in the past 8 hours or so. My list of BC bloggers is roughly as long; they’ve managed to rack up more than a thousand in the same period of time. And all the other bloggers that I read – a few hundred – have apparently written well over 10,000 blog posts.

Now, one of two things has happened. Either everyone else in the world has suddenly been blessed simultaneously by both a lot of free time and a hyperactive muse, or Bloglines is on the fritz.

And since a closer look at those posts finds that most are actually weeks if not months old, I’m guessing it’s the latter.

Here’s the thing: one of the beauties of a newsreader is its ability to remember the last post you read in each news feed, and only serve you up the new stuff. Lose track of what’s new and what’s old, and you also lose one of its most compelling features.

I’m sure the situation is only temporary, and they’ll have it fixed in a day or two. But this shakes my faith in a service that’s pretty core to the way I use the web.