Well it’s that time again. Later today BlogBridge 2.1 comes out with a three awesome new features which will send you running to the Weekly release.  Just Click Here to join the 2.1 gravy train!

First, the much ballyhooed Feed Activity Indicator, which many people love, but not all:

Here’s what to look at:

• Next to the Guide icon (e.g. “News and Views”) we show the total Feeds with any unread
• With each Feed, we now show the total unread Articles in that Feed.
• Both of these counts are clickable, which marks everything as “read”
• In the rightmost position you see an interesting little display telling you how active this feed is. Here’s how you read it: each column of dots corresponds to a single day. The rightmost column is today and moving to the left you see previous days. Each dot in the column corresponds to an Article posted on that day: red for new articles and blue for articles that you’ve already read.

Second, for those of you who are on Bloglines and want to give BlogBridge a whirl, you can now directly import your Bloglines subscriptions with the Guides/Import… It’s pretty much self-evident: in addition to being able to supply an OPML file, you can now simply provide your Bloglines login information (email plus password) and we will examine your account there and import your feeds into BlogBridge trivially. Neat eh?

Third, and a little more esoteric, is we now support “secured” RSS Feeds in a much better way. A secured RSS feed is just one that requires a login. BlogBridge will now prompt you for the login when it first tries to read the feed, and allow you to save a password with the feed so you don’t have to type it in again.

If you are running the Weekly release you will receive 2.1 automatically. If you are one of our new users, running 2.0 (there are lots of you) consider getting onto the ‘weekly’ gravy train. You will get updates on an almost weekly  basis and see the latest magic much earlier. If you don’t like it, don’t worry you can always revert back to running 2.0. Just Click Here to join the 2.1 gravy train!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, interesting

The latest stable version of BlogBridge application has just been updated with several patches. Most noticable of them are:

• Fix for problem with opening Show Discovered Feeds dialog.
• Fix for lockup when deleting feeds.
• Fix for significant loss of GUI responsiveness when looking through the guides with lots of feeds being processed (processing indicator spinning)

If you have anything which is making your BlogBridge life harder or you have any suggestions/comments/reports, please contact us at support/at/blogbridge.com. We are always responsive and ready to help.

Have a good reading!

Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media Inc. and the author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People” has agreed to join us as the topic expert on Journalism.

Grassroots Media is a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding it’s reach. Dan is also well known to those of us who have been at all active in the world of blogging, where his blog is one of the most read. Before doing all this, Dan was a prominent columnist in the San Jose Mercury News. You can read more about Dan and his exploits here.

Dan’s recommendations on feeds and blogs you should look at if the topic you care about is Journalism:

• The Online Journalism Review has two feeds: here is the feed for all their articles and here is the feed for their blogs. OJR is a comprehensive web based journal produced at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California.
• PressThink is Jay Rosen’s blog about the press and journalism. Here is the feed.  Jay Rosen teaches at New York University, Department of Journalism.
• CyberJournalist.net is a news and resource site that focuses on how the Internet, convergence, and new technologies are changing the media. Here is the feed.
• Poynteronline, “Everything you need to be a better journalist” is a rich site on Journalism, published by the Poynter school for journalists. Here is the feed to their “Poynter Extras Tidbits.”

A note about BlogBridge Topic Experts: BlogBridge’s mission is to help you find and use the best information available from the blogs and feeds.  We are constantly trying to get experts in one subject or another to join us as topic experts.

The list of recommendations come directly from the topic expert, and is first announced in our blog. At the same time they are added to our growing directory (on the left) as well as integrated into the BlogBridge application as part of our ’suggestion’ mechanism.

Here’s how to start reading the recommendations:

• You can simply use drag and drop to drag the links in the text above (the ones worded like this: “Here is the feed …”
• You can click on the link in the sidebar at the left to locate the announcement for each topic expert
• Or, in BlogBridge, when you “add a feed” or “add a guide”, request “suggestions” and all the recommended feeds for each expert will be available, directly.

Please send all questions, comments and especially suggestions for other BlogBridge topic experts to us at info\at\blogbridge.com. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, dangillmor, journalism

I am fascinated by beautiful visualizations. One of the things I always wanted to do with BlogBridge is to invent some informative, elegant and novel visualizations of the blogosphere.

I was asked the other day by a prospective BlogBridge developer what could be done there, which led me to create this list of information we can know about what’s going on, to serve as a springboard for coming up with some cool visual concepts. Here is the list:

• We can learn what blogs are connected to which ones, and by how many links
• We can learn the dates of recent postings to each blog
• We can get the text of each posting of each blog and do text analysis on it
• We can find if a posting has been tagged and by who
• We can often find out the country where the blog comes from
• we can often find out the language in which the blog is written
• We can find out the number of sites that link to the blog according to google and other search engines

Certainly there must be some very useful and unusual visualizations that we can come up with from that? We are thinking. Do you have any ideas for us to follow up?

Technorati Tags: visualization

Well, it’s that time again – we shipped another major release of BlogBridge – BlogBridge 2.0.

This release is clearly delivering against our promise to help the info-junkie. We believe that BlogBridge 2.0 has truly become one of the most useful power-user systems in the market – for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Let us take you on a quick tour of some of the new features we embedded into BlogBridge. If you cannot wait, you can of course download it here right now.

Smartfeeds: smartfeeds enable you to create two types of “synthetic” feeds. The first type of smartfeeds are the ones to help you “discover” information. In this case you automatically build feeds within BlogBridge based on your interests by subscribing to outside web services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Findory, Feedster and Technorati. BlogBridge makes it super easy for you to discover new information using those services.

The second type of smartfeeds help you sort through your own information by creating “synthetic” feeds consisting of posts from within the other feeds that you are already subscribing to. So say you subscribe to 300 feeds but your major interest is “marketing”, “PR” and “blogging”. You could create one or multiple smartfeeds based on those keywords – and on days when you’re really busy, you only have to scan through those smartfeeds to find the bare minimum set of posts that address your core interests. You could also set up the smartfeeds based on other criteria – such as number of startz you gave a feed, date, etc.

Next up in this new release is in line tagging capabilities. You like a post and want to save it to del.icio.us or Conotea – just push the tag button, fill in the tags and you’re done – all from within the BlogBridge application. And if you want to tag something and not share it in public – you can use the BlogBridge Service tagging to do exactly that.

So, download it, enjoy it, share it – and don’t forget to give us feedback!

And thank you for your support!

[Technorati Tags: rss reader blogbridge]

We’ve gotten lots of interesting feedback about our proposed new freshness widget (affectionately known as the Kleppner Widget, after the inventors), almost universally positive.

Over on Many to Many, David Weinberger (who is on our advisory board) posts the question “Is this useful information?” rhetorically, and answers:

“I think so. If I see one of the feeds has been very active, I may be driven to catch up. Of course, there are many feeds I value where the posts are few, and I would worry about a widget that drives people merely to the frequently-updated blogs.” (from Many to Many, “Does Frequency Count?”)

Some interesting responses and follow on comments:

“I’ve actually un-subscribed from a few feeds that were too frequent — I found there was no real content, it was just a laundry list of links that took too much time to clean up.” (fromChristina Pikas)

“This sort of info would be very useful. I’d like a per-feed histogram showing how long each post was, across time.” (from Michael Mahemoff)

“On the other hand, providing users with easy to comprehend starting points for browsing a set of information isn’t wrong. The question is, what other starting points does BlogBridge offer?” (from Sascha Carlin)

By the way, the new widget will make it’s first appearance once BlogBridge 2.0 is put to bed (real soon now.)

Technorati Tags: blog, useful, visualization

There I was, minding my own business on the elliptical machine, listening to my iPod today, to one of my favorite Podcasts (and no, I am not just saying that) when I hear my name: “And here’s a letter from Pito who mentions that I should check out BlogBridge…”

Well, gosh, I almost fell off the machine!

Haven’t heard of Geek News Central? It’s a wonderful site with lots of tidbits about computers, technology, the industry, and general geekdom. But mostly I really like the Podcast which is like an entertaining, informative talkshow by geeks, for geeks. it’s a really good listen.

Anyway, not that you will listen to this particular Podcast, after all, all that Todd does is acknowledge my email (and kind of read it over the ‘air’) I can’t wait until Todd actually tries BlogBridge because he would be the canonical user for it. But until then, it was quite a totally unexpected thrill to hear about BlogBridge on Geek News Central. (why Aloha? Todd is in Hawaii

Technorati Tags: geeknewscentral, Geeky

I have found someone much better than myself to be the PR expert for BlogBridge - Shel Holtz. Shel is the principal at Holtz Communication + Technology, a great blogger, a podcaster and uber-pr-guru who wrote a few useful books on communications.

As usual, the feeds which Shel recommends for PR will be available as part of BlogBridge shortly.

The feeds he recommends are:

• Media Guerilla (by Mike Manuel of Voce Communications) - feed here.
  Often cited as the best, most thoughtful of the PR blogs
• Corporate Engagement (by Trevor Cook from Australia) - feed here.
  Frequently cited by other PR bloggers, he’s good at stirring up controversy.
• Musings from POP! Public Relations (by Jeremy Pepper) - feed here.
  A different perspective, sometimes a bit strident, but the PR blogosphere is very aware of him. He also conducts and posts great interviews.
• Online Public Relations Thoughts (by Jim Horton) - feed here.
  Probably the first PR person to blog, even before it was called blogging.
• Corporate PR (by Elizabeth Albrycht) - feed here.
  Elizabeth put together the New Communications Forum
  Thoughtful and intelligent.
• Andy Lark (by Andy Lark)- feed here.
  Former Sun Microsystems top communicator, always interesting.

And even though he did not include his own, we will definitelly add his blog to the list.

Thank you Shel!

[Technorati Tags: shel holtz blogs expert]

We are in the final stages of testing of the upcoming BlogBridge 2.0.

For those of you who have been running 1.0 and didn’t have the ‘nerve’ to try a weekly build, you are going to be, dare I say, astounded! In a coming post I will list all the new stuff that 2.0 has over 1.0, but for now… 

We are looking for anyone running 1.0 today who would be willing to test-fly 2.0. What does that mean? We will give you a very simple procedure to follow which will give you a preview of 2.0 and give us some test results.  The main thing we need your help with is the migration from 1.0 to 2.0. When you run 2.0 it will automatically convert your 1.0 files to 2.0 and it is important to verify that code with as many test-pilots as possible.

Don’t worry it won’t hurt and doesn’t entail any risk.

If you are running BlogBridge 1.0 (look at the title bar of your window for the version number) and want to help, please email us at support@blogbridge.com as soon as possible.  Thanks!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, opensource