What’s a screen cast anyway? It’s just a audio-visual demo of a BlogBridge feature or capability. Here in our BlogBridge recording studios, well, we have a cheap mike, so you will see lots of good content, with crappy audio. By the way, the newer screen casts are first, the older one down the page… just like a, what’s that again? Oh yeah, a blog!

Click here to see the table of contents!

We’re really glad to be able to announce that another expert has joined up with our efforts. Ed Cotton has assembled a really interesting collection of blogs and feeds about “The future of Branding”

Yeah some of the feeds are well known, like Micro Persuation, , but there  many of which I had not come across before and that you may like to discover, such as:

• Ed’s own blog, Influx Insights about branding and marketing
• Bruno Giussani’s Lunch over IP, a really interesting site about ideas and technologies
• Lost Remote, a multi-person-blog about the Future of Television. Fascinating stuff!
• And, as they say, lots, lots more

If this sounds interesting to you I highly recommend that you subscribe to Ed’s list.

Here’s the OPML which you can use within BlogBridge or any other (serious) aggregator to dynamically subscribe to the reading list!

If you don’t remember how, here’s the super-short-hint: Guides Menu -> Subscribe to Reading List. Take a look at this screencast for a more complete explanation.

For the final time in 2006 we are releasing our weekly development release, this time version 4.2. You can take a look at the change history for the details. The major area updated is our new Post To Blog feature, which I think you will agree has come from just two weeks ago.

Take a look at the new and improved Post to Blog box. Here are just some of the improvements:

• You can choose the category right from here (a default is available during setup)
• There are several kinds of links that can be inserted, a generic one, a link to the post in question, and a link to the blog in question
• The box is now modeless and resizable to allow more flexibility during editing, and also a whole lot prettier

In addition to the changes visible here there are a few other related goodies:

• Clicking Ctrl-Shift-C will copy all the article’s htmll onto the clipboard to allow you to use any other tool you like
• We now support both WordPress and Movable Type. Next on the list is Drupal
• The “Excerpt and Link” flavor of post to blog is now much more clever in identifying the excerpt (see Preferences)

And beyond Post to Blog, admittedly our current hobby horse, we’ve added another layer of sophistication to our Proxy support for you enterprise users, and added a really cool new kind of SmartFeed, to search for jobs on the Monster Job Board.

If you are interested in trying the weekly release, read this to understand what a weekly release is, and click here to download and run it.

The weekly development release is quite stable, and where you get to try the latest features, fresh off the boat, as it were. Don’t worry, the development release is totally separate from the normal so one won’t break the other. And if you wish you can take advantage of the BlogBridge Sync service to have the same set of subscriptions in both. Enjoy and let us know what you think!

• BB - PostToBlog: Added MovableType support
• BB - GUI: Updated updates downloader GUI
• BB - GUI: Showing all article controls regular feed has in SmartFeed
• BB - GUI: Fixed “Copy to Clipboard” command in article popup
• BB - GUI: Fixed notifications tab is hidden completely for Java <1.6
• BB - GUI: Copying complete article text (incl. style) as HTML into clipboard (Ctrl-Shift-C)
• BB - GUI: Saving last selected preferences page in this session
• BB - GUI: Added Ctrl/Meta-Shift-B shortcut to open a feed in a browser
• BB - Net: Enhanced proxy handling
• FL - GUI: Added a small icon for users in the search results list
• FL - GUI: Showing user profile to other users
• FL - OPML: Updated with complete Unicode support

One of the things we are constantly doing here at BlogBridge enterprises is to find more great Expert Guides that want to share their expertise with the world. Each of these experts is selected because of their unique knowledge of the best sources in the blogosphere on their topic.

Today, let me introduce briefly introduce Lynette Chandler who is our new Expert Guide on “Marketing Technology”, which you can find here. Here is what Lynette says by way of introduction:

“Technology has helped make many people and companies successful and with the Internet today, there’s no escaping it. So you either learn and exploit it or risk failure. I’ll help you discover which technologies can help improve your marketing, how to use it to your advantage and ultimately help you suceed without working harder or spending a lot of money.

As usual, you can browse the BlogBridge Topic Guides right from the web and use them with any aggregator you like. From within BlogBridge it is possible to directly access the collection and with a single click subscribe to the whole guide or just an individual feed. Try it!

Oh, p.s. if you have a passion for something and can recommend the best feeds and blogs for that topic, please let us know!

Check out this post by Jim Moore of Harvard, where he explores some of the history and significance of OPML,from the OPML Blog. The whole post is interesting, but this part especially cost my eye:

[snip...]

Pito Salas’ Blogbridge is the most powerful aggregator available, and allows remote access to OPML feeds–meaning that a complex network targeting shared, dynamic OPML feeds can be readily constructed and will operate automagically. In addition, Pito publishes OPML feeds for use by others, including his Top
100 blogs opml source.

[snip...]

(read the whole thing, from: The Harvard Book of OPML)

OPML is indeed a very big deal, and we have more tricks up our sleeves in that arena!

An aggregator is basically a software tool that seeks out the feeds you want and brings back the content to your desktop. There are all kinds of different aggregators with all kinds of different features. We encourage you to compare aggregators because we think you’ll like our features and you’ll agree that BlogBridge is the coolest. And it’s free.

Some of you also read my personal blog. You may have noticed that suddenly I have like 4 posts in one day. How is that possible? I hear you asking? (Ok maybe I just imagine hearing you I am using the uber-cool “post to blog” feature that showed it’s pretty face in this week’s weekly release. We are refining and making it better this iteration, so hold your hat for the next go through, a week from Friday!

This is pretty great. Two of our favorite users, Kathleen Gilroy and D’Arcy Norman, both also topic experts, each have created a screencast showing off how they use BlogBridge as part of their work.

Kathleen Gilroy heads up the Otter Group. Her screencast covers aggregation, feed management and sharing. In this context she shows some really interesting ways to use BlogBridge together with our Feed Library software. She particularly illustrates the how to use them together, building collections in one and subscribing to them in the other. Here’s a link to her post and Screencast.

D’Arcy Norman is a well known blogger focusing on Learning related matters. In real life he’s an educational technology developer at the Teaching & Learning Centre at the University of Calgary. D’Arcy is a heavy reader of blogs and feeds. His screencast is really interesting in illustrating how he gets a ton of productivity from some of the power features of BlogBridge. Here’s a link to his post and Screencast.

It’s really great for us when our users care enough to record and publish their experiences with our products. We are also showcasing them on our Screencasts pages. Thanks!

This is pretty great. Two of our favorite users, Kathleen Gilroy and D’Arcy Norman, both also topic experts, each have created a screencast showing off how they use BlogBridge as part of their work.

Kathleen Gilroy heads up the Otter Group. Her screencast covers aggregation, feed management and sharing. In this context she shows some really interesting ways to use BlogBridge together with our Feed Library software. She particularly illustrates the how to use them together, building collections in one and subscribing to them in the other. Here’s a link to her post and Screencast.

D’Arcy Norman is a well known blogger focusing on Learning related matters. In real life he’s an educational technology developer at the Learning & Learning Centre at the University of Calgary. D’Arcy is a heavy reader of blogs and feeds. His screencast is really interesting in illustrating how he gets a ton of productivity from some of the power features of BlogBridge. Here’s a link to his post and Screencast.

It’s really great for us when our users care enough to record and publish their experiences with our products. We are also showcasing them on our Screencasts pages. Thanks!