Besides a kick-ass aggregator, you might not have realized that BlogBridge also has lots of content. In keeping with our ‘big idea’ we have made it our mission to help you find blogs on all kinds of topics that you might be interested in. There are several paths into this world that I want to quickly introduce you to.

First off, take a look at the BlogBridge Topic Guides. Yeah, go ahead, click there now and look around that section of our web site. What you will find is a pretty broad collection of topics and subtopics, organized nicely into folders and sub folders of blogs, feeds and so on. It’s a great way to just get a feel of what’s out there. And we are constantly adding to this set.

If you look at a particular Feed there, you will see some pretty useful information. Guess what’s in there? A little feed reader, web based no less. Yeah you thought we hated web based feed readers and here we have one as a little feature right in our Topic Guides. You also see information about the Technorati rank of the feed, and the number of inlinks it has. All to help you decide if this is one you want to read.

But where, oh where, do these topic guides come from? Ah, well many of them are written and maintained by BlogBridge Topic Experts. These are real people who are passionate about something and so follow the blogosphere religiously for information on that topic. Here’s an example of Mark Anderson’s Expert Guide for Caroons & Cartooning, for example. We are always looking to recruit more topic experts so send me an email if you are interested! (In case you are wondering, the non-Expert guides are written by us, your humble servants )

Of course our Topic Guides are useful to anyone, not just BlogBridge users. At every level you can get the RSS feed for blog you like, and an OPML URL for a collection you like. Go ahead and subscribe to it in your favorite reader (even if it’s not BlogBridge.)

If you use BlogBridge there’s some really cool integration. In BlogBridge, when adding a feed, a guide, a reading list, you will see a nice little SUGGEST button that will let you browse our Topic Guides directly from the aggregator. Handy.

Now let’s say you really like the way our Topic Guides look and work, but you have a different idea. Say you are the librarian in a Fortune 500 company, or say you run IT for the Museum of Science, or say you are in charge of a research lab. You want to curate a collection of blogs, feeds, and reading lists, even Podcasts for your community (you know, they say this RSS thing is gonna be big!.)

We also offer you the possibility of creating a private Topic library, just for your users, with content that you add. We call that our Feed Library software product.

Let us know what you think and whether you have any cool applications!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, feedlibrary, feeds, podcasts, tags

George Nemeth of “Brewed Fresh Daily” writes:

“I was total disappointed because BlogBridge is the best Linux feed reader I’ve found. To me, one of their biggest advantages is their web service, which backs up your list of feeds on a periodic basis. The combination of a web back up (why I’ve tried every other service–bloglines, rojo, netvibes, google reader–is because if my primary machine that I’ve been subscribing blogs with goes down and I haven’t backed up my opml… *shudder*) with the speed of a desktop reader makes it a killer app for a powerblogger.”

Thanks George! Read the whole post.

Now that our wonderful new site is up and running, we are going through and working on the content. Here’s a bit from what you might call the BlogBridge manifesto:

What keeps us going is a burning desire to help you find information on your passion that you will want to look at as often as you look at your favorite magazine subscriptions — maybe even more. We know that there is great stuff, regularly written, by experts in almost every field — and we also know that there are many people who would stand up and cheer if we could bring that information to them easily.

Read the whole BlogBridge manifesto, or “The Big Idea”

Technorati Tags: blogbridge manifesto

Hi sports fans. As of now we are running on our new and improved server farm (of one with our new and improved web site. It’s organized differently than before and hopefully more intuitively. It also has (or at least will have) lots of new content to help you make sense out of what we offer.

We felt the need for a redesign for two reasons:

1. Our old site had gotten more and more cluttered and disorganized and we were hearing from our users that it was confusing and hard to navigate.
2. Now that we had several products (BlogBridge itself, the Feed Library, the Expert Guides) we needed to broaden the content to make it work in this new and improved world.

Hope you like it, and if you are looking for information and you can’t find it, you know where to find me! Thanks for your continued support!

• BB - GUI: Reworked Advanced preferences page
• BB - GUI: Fixed uncontrollable growth of some dialogs with long URL’s
• BB - GUI: Page up / down scrolls exactly one page up / down
• BB - GUI: Step scrolling changed to 1/10 of the page height (experimental)

Dear Users!

These days we are moving to our own server. We do it to provide even better and faster service. It’s not a secret that this arduous procedure is error prone and there can be temporary outages, but be sure we make our best to minimize them.

We plan to replace this site with its updated and greatly reworked version during the migration. It’s going to look more like a community-centered product site rather than a usual blog. Most of the elements and pages have already migrated, and some new content pages have been added. Our goal is to shed the light on brand new perspective of blogging and effective information management. We hope you like it as we do.

Let me finish this short announcement on a technical note. We know there are some users who are unable to use BlogBridge Service being locked behind firewalls. Our Service runs on the non-standard network port 8080 today, which is usually blocked by ISPs and network administrators. As we now will be running our own server, it becomes possible to assign it to the standard web port, thus giving full access to all magic of BlogBridge Service to everyone in the world.

Again, please be patient and accept our apologies for all possible inconveniences.

Pito and Aleksey

Over on www.salas.com I’ve written a series of  musings on a product or service that might be cool to build. Yeah I am giving away all my secrets.

Check em out:

• The answer is not a better RSS Aggregator
• The answer is not a better RSS Aggregator, continued
• More musings on the not-better-RSS-aggregator

Warning: these are a bit rambling musings, not crisp product specs. By far. But still write me if you have any thoughts!

Technorati Tags: eclectica, omnivore, feed.tv

There’s an interesting discussion floating around about RSS. I won’t belabor it, but here are a couple of links:

Read/Write Web: 2007 will be a big year for RSS (Richard MacManus)

Ten Things I wish IE7 was about to deliver (Marshall Kirkpatrick)

I got onto this thread via Geek News Central, where Todd Cochrane in: “Some claim 2007 will be a big year for RSS”, writes:

“The author of the Read /Write Weblog says that 2007 will be a big year for RSS. Personally I am not as optimistic, but I have been wrong before.”

“Sites that are going to benefit the most of course are major media outlets, web sites like mine which attract a niche crowd probably will not see such a significant impact. The main problem of course will be educating people on the power of syndication.” (from Geek News Central)

See my view is that we are not going to see mass market adoption of RSS until RSS becomes invisible. (Compare: I would argue there is mass market adoption of XML and yet no normal person knows what it is.)

Yes at some point not to far in the future (but not 2007) many many civilians will be getting benefits from RSS every day, but they won’t know it.

So while I think of course that RSS support in IE7 is super important, I don’t think it will be the catalyst. From what I gather, IE7’s support of RSS will be several times better than what FireFox and Safari already provide. Which is a good thing, but I believe that RSS will be a big success when no one talks about it anymore.

(Also see my musings on what might come after Aggregators, RSS and all that stuff.)

Technorati Tags: RSS

I want to point you to a bit I wrote in my personal blog entitled: “The Answer is not a better aggregator” where I set the scene for a new product that we might be working on. Check it out. Let us know what you think.

Technorati Tags: aggregators

Sorry for the inconvenience. Our guides and trial directories are all back online again. Thanks for your patience!