Amanda Watlington who runs Searching for Profit has agreed to become a BlogBridge topic expert on  Search Engine Optimization and Marketing. Amanda has been working with the Web since 1993 and is a renowned expert in the search industry, where she has developed patent-pending tools and methodologies for search marketing.

Here are her recommended feeds: You can add them by just dragging and dropping these links onto BlogBridge:

• Blogs and Feeds
• John Battelle’s Search Blog
• Online Marketing Blog
• Research Buzz
• Search Engine Lowdown
• Search Engine Watch Blog
• SEO Book
• SEO Roundtable
• SEO-PR – Best Blogs Channel
• Stuntdubl . . .  Getting’ Hit by Traffic

And of course, these are available to new users through the BlogBridge setup wizard:

As well as to all users, whenever they create a new Feed or Guide.

It’s all good!

Technorati Tags: search, searchengineoptimizatoin, SEO

BlogBridge has a hybrid architecture. By that I mean, that the BlogBridge ’system’ consists of a combination of a rich client and a service. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, because I think, to the techies out there, it’s kind of interesting.

If you aren’t a techie, then “you are getting verrry sleeeeeepy… ZZzzzzz”

BlogBridge users know that it is an application which runs on your computer, giving you a pleasant and usable window where you can read feeds, but importantly also discover new information that you care about, and manage it in a productive way. So, like Outlook or Firefox, it’s an application.

In addition, you might have heard about the BlogBridge Service which we strongly  encourage you to sign up for (it’s free by the way.) If you do, BlogBridge will conveniently save your context or state ‘in the cloud’ so that you have your context no matter what computer you are using.

But what you may not know is that the BlogBridge service, behind the scenes, actually is responsible for several other key capabilities of the app.

For example, when you enter a URL that it doesn’t know, it’s the service that tries to discover the RSS feed behind the URL, caching the result, so that the next user that asks about that URL can get the answer right away.

Another example is that the service does the scoring of feeds for you providing the baseline number of BlogStarz that are displayed in the application. And, it’s the service that is responsible for rolling up all users’ ratings (so called Gold BlogStarz) to provide the collaborative filtering capabilities of BlogBridge.

Architecturally, the BlogBridge service is accessed through an XML-RPC API, with calls for each of the various services it provides. Some of the services require that the user have a BlogBridge account, and some don’t.

All in all it’s a very convenient model, which allows us to both provide the best user experience via a rich client application, and still have the advantages of having a presence “in the cloud” at all times to offload some of the heavy lifting to.

Strategically, there are advantages too. As the feed reader space is rather (ahem) busy, we set the scene for bringing some of our unique capabilities to other feed readers in the future.

SmartFeeds bring something new to BlogBridge, the ability to create your own custom feeds, based on your specifications. Let’s take a step by step look at how to use SmartFeeds. (By the way, if you are familiar with iTunes, SmartFeeds are somewhat analogous to iTunes Smart Playlists.)

Notice the new “Create SmartFeed” button in the toolbar. SmartFeeds, like all Feeds, are organized with Guides, those big icon buttons along the left side of the window. Begin the process of creating a new SmartFeed by simply clicking the Create SmartFeed… button.

This is the Create SmartFeed dialog box. The first choice (”Collect articles from:” )in the dialog is the most important, as it tells what kind of SmartFeed you would like.

Looking ahead, when this dialog box completes, you are left with a new Feed with the specified name (from the “Titie:” field) with articles collected from one of several sources. At a high level, that’s all there is to it.

So really all that is left is to explain the different article sources.

Here’s how that works: Either the articles are collected from among your own subscriptions - that is the feeds and guides that you have chosen and that are currently available to you, or the articles are collected from the whole internet, from the blogosphere as a whole. In the latter situation, BlogBridge is getting the help from any of a number of great web based services such as Technorati and Feedster who scour the blogosphere around the clock.

Here’s a specific example of how to create a SmartFeed that uses Technorati’s Tag searches to find content from across the internet that has been tagged as “Funny.”

If you are interested, you can learn a lot more about Technorati and tagging, In simple terms, Technorati is searching the web for content which user’s have labeled as “funny” and bringing back all those articles for you in the form of a feed.

Similarly, here’s how you create a SmartFeed which uses Flickr’s service to discover photographs that are tagged as being from Iraq.

You will be amazed at how interesting and useful these photo feeds are. And they are super easy to create. Just give it a try!

Finally, let’s describe the fanciest and most powerful kind of SmartFeed. Look at the image on the left: I am collecting all articles, from all the feeds that I have subscribed in BlogBridge, which were rated with 3 BlogStarz, and are unread.

In other words, this SmartFeed will pull articles from any of the feeds that I have subscribed, in any guide, as long as the Feed was rated 3 BlogStarz, and the article unread.

There are numerous useful other variations, for example:

• Show me all articles which mention the word “Microsoft” and are unread
• Show me all the articles that I received in the last 3 days
• Show me all articles from Feeds that I rated only 1 star and were received today
• Show me articles that mention “Iraq” or which are in a guide with the word “Iraq” in the name.

In conlusion: SmartFeeds are a handy (and really quite powerful) way to discover new important stuff in the blogosphere, and then in turn, to help you focus your attention on the stuff that will make the most difference to you.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogbridge, UI

Feeds in BlogBridge are basically a stream of articles, generally from a blog or news source or something like that. These are the feeds that you’ve always known and loved - RSS, Atom and all that.

SmartFeeds are magic! They are created based on rules that you specify. An example should make this clear: What if you could search all blogs at any time for occurences of the word “Microsoft”? Wouldn’t that be useful? And what if that search just ran all the time, and you got the results of the search as a feed? A SmartFeed!

Another example: what if you wanted to see all the information from the feeds in a certain guide that was still unread? Or all the information from 3 BlogStar Feeds that came in today?

You can do all that, and more, with SmartFeeds.

Using SmartFeeds

You create a SmartFeed with the (duh) “Create SmartFeed…” command. The first option is the most important: where do you want to collect articles from? Either you can look within your own sets of subscriptions (”Collect Articles from My Own BlogBridge Feeds”), or you can ask BlogBridge to work with a variety of search engines on the web to build up the result. Let’s look at each in turn.

Collect Articles from my own BlogBridge feeds: This SmartFeed will look through all the articles, feeds and guides that you have subscribed to with BlogBridge and pull together those that match your conditions. Unread, BlogStarz, Date, Text, and Feed name can all be used to define which ones you want. There are all sorts of ways to use this - what I can say in general is that BlogBridge is looking at all the stuff that you are subscribed to, in whatever feed or guide, put it all in a single list for easy browsing.

Now the rest of the SmartFeed flavors follow a very similar pattern. The key difference is that, instead of looking through the stuff you have subscribed to, it looks far and wide, over the whole internet - whether it is pictures on Flickr, or links on del.icio.us, or tags on Technorati (and there are a few more.) It’s really a great way to keep up with what’s going on on the web that you may not even know about.

Sorry to say, I didn’t make it to the Supernova 2005 conference. Tags to the rescue!

Dr. Scoble, writes:

“Supernova conference page on Technorati shows power of tagging at events. Here’s the tag for the Supernova conference that starts today in San Francisco: supernova2005.”

Here’s how easy to follow a tag with BlogBridge:

Here’s what you are looking at. We are creating a SmartFeed to follow Supernova. The dialog box on the left is how you create a Technorati Tag SmartFeed. You give it a name, and specify the tag you want (supernova2005.) That’s all. If you look at the main window on the right, you can see the results. One step! A SmartFeed is a convenient way for non-techie end users to take advantage of Technorati’s awesome tagging capability.

By the way, in case this is your first visit to BlogBridge, here’s a primer. It’s free. It’s cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux.) It’s open source. It’s more than just another blog aggregator. It has numerous capabilities (like SmartFeeds) focused on helping you discover interesting information you didn’t know existed and then manage the resulting information (overload.)

This is a brand new feature, available in today’s weekly release, version 1.8. Click here to try it out!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, recommended, supernova2005, tag, technorati

This has got to be the most literate blurb anyone has written about BlogBridge. We love it!

“… As the head of the Roman religion, the pope of the Catholic Church is still called pontifex maximus today, and bridges still have the same metaphorical meaning as symbols of connections. BlogBridge wants to connect you to the world of blogs, news and podcasts…” (from About Email)

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, funny

I was reading Jason’s post this morning over at thejasoncalacanisweblog - which got me wondering whether an aggregator company can ever make money?

To a certain degree, I agree with Jason that it is not appropriate for people to take others’ content and make money on it without the permission of the original content owner. That argument seems to make sense when I am thinking of people that steal your content to put on some web site alongside ads. Where it breaks down for me is in the scenario of a company selling an aggregator to its end users (and there are some of them out there). In effect, and according to Jason’s logic, that company is also making money from someone else’s content.

Ah, maybe there is some lawyer out there who can enlighten us.

[Technorati Tags: rss aggregator IP]

True story:

I read in Doc Searls Weblog about a conference, Reboot, that I had never heard of before.

Here’s what Doc says:

“My first reboot7 photo roll is up at Flickr. Here are all the Flickr pix tagged “reboot.”

Hmm, I say, sounds interesting.

1. In BlogBridge, I create a new Flickr SmartFeed:

2. I ask for the reboot tag:

3. And voilá, the pictures from the conference! Pretty cool!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, flickr, smartfeeds

In addition to appearing on the “Traditional Side” (left side bar) of our web site, now, our experts are available right from within the product itself! There are currently three places:

• New users are offered collections of feeds to pick from as starting points. Within those collections they can now choose the experts’ recommendations
• When creating a new Guide, the same collections can be accessed as Suggestions as well
• When subscribing to a new Feed, again, the same collections can be accessed.

And this is just the beginning “low hanging fruit” implementation. We are working on more complete integration for both users and experts to really ignite this capability. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, interesting

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what our users are reading and rating highly? Well we’ve done just that, with our new “Users’ Favorites” page. In the left hand side bar you see the top 10, and go here to see the top 100!

A couple of details: you may wonder where the score in “our rating” comes from. It’s a weighed average combining both the average Gold BlogStarz! ratings from our users with the total number of users who have subscribed to each of those feeds.

By the way…

Here’s another reason for you to be using our (FREE! Did I mention that?) BlogBridge Service to sync your context over multiple computers. It is also a handy backup, and finally of course, the only way for us to count your votes in our score.

So, please, use the BlogBridge Service and sync! We even have a Screencast to explain how very very simple it is to use!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge