Nial Kennedy just announced that the distributed blog performance monitoring service GrabPERF is now being hosted at Technorati's facilities.  GrabPERF mimics users by loading various blogs throughout each day from different locations around the world and seeing how fast or slow they are.  This is potentially useful data as it stands right now, but you can't help but wonder whether the number of blogs being monitored is going to expand greatly as the system gains access to far greater bandwidth in the move.  Will load time be one of the metrics now offered publicly by Technorati?  It would be an interesting way to further differentiate various online media sources by the quality of user experience.

GrabPERF's service currently shows the 20 fastest and the 20 slowest of the many big blogs and services they are monitoring.  It also allows you to compare the page load time and uptime of any two sites in their database.  Pretty interesting.  Funniest thing I noticed?  Blog.com is listed as one of a handful of corporate sponsors on the site and is currently #1 on the list of slowest, least available site monitored!

The service also monitors blog search engines.  In the newest graph we can see that Technorati's service had a rough week but is speeding up as of yesterday,  Blog Digger had a near implosion last Saturday but recovered quickly and Feedster's relaunch appears to have made a substantial difference in their service's speed, taking them from the slow part of the pack to the fast part.  Cool!