Well, here we go again! We are really happy and excited to let you all know that we’ve just released BlogBridge 3.0, which is the update to BlogBridge 2.16 which we released on April 7, 2006, so about 3 months ago.

BlogBridge 3.0 now will alert you when it receives new articles, new feeds and new guides. We’ve implemented this in a ‘platform sensitive‘ way.

On Windows XP and Linux, we use the standard ’system tray’ and on Macintosh OS X we use the ‘Growl’ notification facility.

The alerts include how many articles have been added, how many Feeds have been added, and into how may Guides.

BlogBridge 3.0 now now works with the new ‘BlogBridge Guides’ web site, where you can browse and search and the large collection of suggested Guides and Feeds that you get with BlogBridge.

The same Feeds and Guides you see on our web site are presented to you from inside BlogBridge.

They are presented to you through a “Suggest” button:

• when subscribing to a Feed
• when creating a new Guide
• when subscribing to a Reading List
• and upon initial setup of BlogBridge

BlogBridge 3.0 is now ready to be translated into national language. Our initial translation is into Russian, as Aleksey speaks Russian

Even there we encountered some interesting challenges with our buzzwords like Guide and Feed.

By the way, if you’d like to help us translate into other languages, please let us know. It’s pretty easy (once you know the other language, of course

BlogBridge 3.0 now permits users to ‘Pin‘ an article. This has several helpful effects.

First of all, Pinned articles never get purged, so they stay in  your database forever. Also there are special SmartFeed parameters to limit a search to only Pinned article. And if you use our cool Find feature, Pinned articles are called out separately.

BlogBridge 3.0 includes a nice new shortcut for people who like the Toolbar provides a one click ‘Synchronize Now’ command.

For those of you who aren’t yet using the Synch feature, why not? It’s free and easy, and useful for more than just saving your Subscriptions to our Servers. Check it out!

Those are just some of the highlights of BlogBridge 3.0. There are lots of other small improvements, refinements, new features, performance improvements.

Not to mention that BlogBridge 3.0 should be even more stable on whatever platform (Windows, Mac or Linux) you prefer.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s FREE?

Click here to download and try the latest BlogBridge 3.0!

Users of BlogBridge 2.16 as well of those of you using the weekly development release will be automagically upgraded.

Please do send us your comments, feedback, complaints and requests. Enjoy!

ONE MORE THING: See this ‘DIGG’ link? Click it! If you like BlogBridge, how about helping the cause and Digging us. If you’ve never done Digg before, try it, it’s fun, quick and free to sign up.

Technorati Tags: aggregators, blogbridge

Amyloo waxes poetic about OPML: “Let it live, let it breathe and grow. I think you deny OPML an essential aspect of its nature when you seal it off like that. Make it less like a Ball jar and more like an egg.”

Actually she is wondering whether she can subscribe to a reading list that is stored on her own local drive in an OPML file.

I never miss a chance to show off some cool BlogBridge feature, so I couldn’t resist!

It turns out that in BlogBridge subscribing to a local file OPML  is easy and works fine and dynamically.

All you need to do is to create a Guide and and subscribe to a ‘file’ URL (e.g. “file://myreadinglist.opml” and life is good! BlogBridge will build the Guide based on the listed OPML file and periodically check for changes.

p.s. Of course even easier is to just Publish the BlogBridge guide (single checkbox) and an OPML will be created, and published to the world for you to give out to all your friends! Even easier.

Technorati Tags: OPML, readinglists

• Core: Fixed several lockups
• Core: Fixed marking SmartFeeds as read
• Core: Fixed problem with inconsistent data types in DB
• Discovery: Removed some known extensions from discovery
• BBL: Go Back buttons doesn’t work
• BBL: Cross-site logins prohibited
• BBL: Fixed not showing some folders as available for listing in
• BBL: Added “OK, and Add More” button to “New Feed” and “New Folder” dialogs
• BBL: Tags cloud and search integration
• BBL: Stylesheet tweaks
• BBL: Feed preview feature
• BBS: Upgraded XML-RPC library for greater performance and reliability
• BBS: Removed BBL-related forums from the send-feedback list

Yeah, actually this paper from “Shift Communications” is about some other topics than just how to (not) pitch a blogger. One my favorites: “Get Personal: Use the blogger’s first name!” Here are some other interesting answers to that age-old question: “How can I pitch a blogger”?

• Observe the rules of engagement. Ever see a “rules of engagement” page? Here’s the one from Jeff Jarvis, a top blogger in the mediasphere.
• Don’t pitch bloggers via email (unless you know they don’t mind).
• Read their blogs and, if you can, start building a rapport with a blogger way before you pitch them.
• Comment frequently on blogs you’re likely to pitch (the comments, however, have to relate to a post).
• Get personal: Use the blogger’s first name.
• Leave comments. Yes, PR people are trained to stay in the background. Get over it.
• Incorporate your pitch in a comment (again remember, it has to fit).
• Keep up with memes (see an explanation on memes further down). Certain “uber-themes” resonate with a large numbers of bloggers. Craft your own opinions on these themes and be prepared to discuss them. Two good sites to discover top “memes of the day” are here and here. The technorati homepage is also a good place to figure out what’s hot in the blogosphere that day.
• Check out the pitching preferences of bloggers (some want to be pitched via del.icio.us or allow you to submit a profile such as TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington).
• Study a blogger’s other blogs. Gizmodo news editor John Biggs, for example, offers his e-mail address and phone number on his “other”” blog/Web site, not on Gizmodo.
• Nominate an online journalist at Cyberjournalist.net. It’s not flattery if you sincerely believe a journalist is good and brings consistent value. Then have the nerve to drop a line to the journalist you nominated and be prepared to explain why his/her work caught your eye. You can consider this to be sucking-up, and partly it is, but remember that PR 2.0 is about transparency

Actually this is quite an interesting document for people in PR and not. I recommend it!

Technorati Tags: PR

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/prod.aspx?p=blogbridge.66961216

Hey, check out our new black BlogBridge T-Shirts. We’re selling them with no mark up at all, at cost that is, to all our users. If you are interested, click here to go to our Cafe Press store page and place your order there.

Now, If you are a huge BlogBridge fan and can prove it to us, then we’ll send you one of these cool t-shirts (did I say they were COOL?) as a token of our appreciation.

Technorati Tags: cool, cooltool, t-shirt, tchotchke

“We’ve decided to make BlogBridge our RSS reader of choice. We’ll be installing it on all of our student computers over the summer, and making it available to staff.”

This is from Michael Webb’s blog, “Thoughts from IT and Media Service, University of Wales, Newport”, in the UK. This is great news indeed!

Why was BlogBridge selected?

“There are loads of free RSS Readers available, so it was a tough choice, but we went for BlogBridge as it meet all our key critera:

• Friendly user interface
• Ability to access your feeds at home or at work.
• Available for Windows and Mac.” (from the same posting)

Technorati Tags: aggregators, blogbridge

Nouveau Riche University - A Wealth Building College based out of Scottsdale Arizona. Educating the Public on Real Estate Investing.

Just a quick reminder that we are having another super-informal-geeky-but-not-exclusively-geeks Geek Dinner, and we have a lovely new location, sponsored by our friends at Permabit. The location is on First Street, in Cambridge, MA, USA, in the so-called “Davenport” Building, on the second floor.

See you there!

Here are the coordinates:

When: July 19, Wednesday, 6:30pm to 9:30pm

Where: Permabit, 25 First Street, 2nd Floor. Across from the Galleria Mall.

Topics of discussion: AJAXPHPOPMLRSSJAVAETC

Please confirm your attendance by clicking here!

• Core: Upgraded database engine
• GUI: Renamed ‘flagged’ to ‘pinned’ article property name
• GUI: Fixed problem with loading some images from Gizmodo and other sites
• GUI: Double-clicking over the image in photo-feed opens it in browser
• GUI: Fixed inconsistency between activity graph and the list of articles
• Core: Fixed bugs with saving contents of links, writing images to cache, removing reading lists, discovery
• BBL: Started versioning

BlogBridge’s Feed Library (BBL) is a software product that we announced on June 8th. 

“BlogBridge’s Feed Library (BBL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the ’store’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.” (from BlogBridge Feed Library announcement)

At this moment we have about a dozen trials going on with people all over the world.

It looks like we are getting a lot of interest from people in academia and other non-profit organizations, and they tend to have roles in library-like organizations. Surprise surprise

If you want to check it out, there are a few possibilities:

• Click here to take a look at the extensive library we’ve set up for our own users. You will see a nicely organized Library with real content, but of course you will not be able to modify it.
• Click here to request trial access to a separate library that you can make changes to.
• Click here to our “Library Playpen”, log in as “User1” with the password “password” and you can access the library as a librarian. Every night it will get reset though.

One question that we haven’t fully answered yet is pricing. Here are some preliminary facts. All this can be changed at any time without notice! BlogBridge’s Feed Library will come in three flavors: BBL Open Source, BBL On Demand, and BBL On Premises.

• BBL Open Source is for non-commercial and evaluation use only. The source code will be downloadable under a modified BSD license.
• BBL On-Demand will be hosted on our servers on a monthly subscription basis, depending on use.
• BBL On-Premises is a product that you can host on your server, inside your firewall. It be offered on an annual license basis, depending on use.

Again, all of this is still being nailed down. If you have any thoughts or questions, please contact us soon!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, blogbridgelibrary

BlogBridge’s Feed Library (BBL) is a software product that we announced on June 8th.

“BlogBridge’s Feed Library (BBL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the ’store’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.” (from BlogBridge Feed Library announcement)

At this moment we have about a dozen trials going on with people all over the world. It looks like we are getting a lot of interest from people in academia and other non-profit organizations, and they tend to have roles in library-like organizations. Surprise surprise

By the way, if you are interested in playing with Feed Library, please send us an email requesting a trial. Or you can just check out the
Feed Library “Playpen” which is a free for al where anyone can be a librarian and add content. Every night though, we reset it back to an initial state.