Here is fantastic and detailed review of BlogBridge on Linux. You should definitely check it out!

Yes, the Linux Blog is talking about BlogBridge today. To say that he is enthusiastic would be an understatement:

“[snip…] And to my delight, it’s a cross-platform, GPL Licensed, Feed-synchronizing one that delivers unparalleled functionality and options. There’s nothing like it on the planet.[snip…]” (from BlogBridge, Simply the Best)

But, this is not just some puff-piece. It is based on a real user’s experience, and is detailed with specifics that you will be interested in:

“[snip…]It’s one of the best feed readers I have ever used. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to cover near as much ground in a small amount of time. It allows me to scan through hundreds of blogs daily and filter out the stuff that doesn’t interest me.

There seems to be a lot of this today as people start out well but then turn their blog into a news aggregator or change focus and broaden what they blog about.

This review is going to be populated heavily with screenshots of this amazing tool. I’ll go through some of the functionality of Blogbridge but overall, there are too many features to cover in a single article.[snip…]” (from BlogBridge, Simply the Best)

It’s Friday and it means we are releasing another sweet development version — BlogBridge 4.6 Weekly. Most of efforts during the past two weeks were channeled into the site development, mainly into personalized My BlogBridge part of it. However, there are also some interesting and important changes to the desktop client.

HTML Editor. Most of us normal users, the amateur bloggers, are pretty satisfied with the rich post editor, but as a professional mini-publisher, you may need something more sophisticated giving the advanced level of control over the code being posted to your blog. The plain HTML editor gives you this low level and lets you carve the code precisely as you like.

Post code cleaning. Before the post is sent to your blog, it’s pre-processed and beautified now. Pre-processing includes removing redundant leading and trailing code, and replacing HTML entities of national symbols with their plain UTF-8 (Unicode) versions so far, but this list will grow as we discover more issues. Yes, I know it’s geeky, but at least you know it’s there now.

Aside from the above mentioned features, there are several important bug fixes and little improvements. Check them in the history of changes.

For those who are interested yet not positive where to get this version, here’s the link to the BlogBridge Weekly version installer. Enjoy BlogBridge and let us know what you think.

• BB - GUI: Post to Blog. Added plain text HTML editor (Publishing plan)
• BB - Sync: Fixed bug with storing / restoring SmartFeeds on Russian Locale stations
• BB - GUI: Replaced native Mac OS X drop-down list component in the articles pane bar
• BB - Core: Enabled Publication, Subscription and Synchronization limits
• BB - Core: Fixed send feedback feature
• BB - GUI: Fixed D’n'D of feeds between guides

Here’s an odd but important problem, at least for us here at BlogBridge.

When you sign up for a BlogBridge account, we, like many other sites, send you a confirmation email to verify that your email is for real.

Truthfully from a security point of view, I am not even exactly sure what it proves. That at one moment in time the person creating the account also was able to receive emails at an arbitrary email address. So what? It’s so easy to get a temporary free email account, that I am not sure what it does.

So that’s question one: does an activation email really provide any benefit to anyone? Any comments?

Now a question that has come to our attention is that in many cases a person’s spam filter intercepts the activation email so the person never even sees it, and hence the account is never activated, and hence the account appears not to work.

So scenario: The sender and recipient both want the message be received, but there is a a big-brother spam filter (like Google Mail, which I think is the bestest) that insists on sidelining the email into the spam filter.

So that’s question two: Is there any way to assure a non-junk email actually makes it through? Any answers?

Have you been following the buzz about Yahoo Pipes? There has been a ton written about it so there’s nothign really to ad. The BlogBridge application that really interests us is to try to create a pipe to filter a feed to remove duplicates, a popular and annoying problem. Some experiments a few days ago are promising.Of course I’ve been following the Pipes bulletin boards with BlogBridge :)It seems that others are working on something similar as you can see in this this post from General Discussion about Pipes:

"I’ve created a pipe that agregates general news from yahoo, google, and others. My problem is filtering for unique stories. I don’t know how many times over the last few days I have seen the ‘eating fish during pregnancy is good’ story. Today my news pipes had the same story 4 times. I filter on unique title, and that does not seem to be working. Also, the same story will show up with the title altered by the addition of the source of the story appended to the title. For example: Eat Fish - Houston Chronical and Eat Fish - New York Times. It there a better way to filter for unique stories beside the title?"

(from: Finding Unique Stories)

One more thing. We decided to give a 3 month Free “Basic” Plan BlogBridge service account to everyone who has used the BlogBridge Service in the past. The database update is running as we speak. So check out your My BlogBridge to see it appear!

We are getting ready to launch our new BlogBridge Service Plans

Caveat: We are doing our best to make it really smooth for you, but please bear with us if something breaks, and let us know and we will follow up immediately.

So what will you notice, if anything?

• Users of BlogBridge 4.0.1 (the last full release) will not notice anything. Nothing will change.
• Users of our weekly development release (BlogBridge 4.6) may notice some new messages and some new commands becoming available.
• The messages may warn that you are over the limit for certain of the capacity of performance limits for your level of service. Note that other than reminding you, BlogBridge will not force you to come down.
• Within My BlogBridge, you will now see “PayPal” payment buttons to allow you to actually spend your hard earned cash on a subscription, either at the Basic or Publisher level.
• All subscriptions are for 3 months at a time and will renew automatically.
• You can cancel or change a subscription at any time.
• Remember again, there is a Free level that everyone can take advantage of.
• If you don’t care to subscribe but would like to send us some love anyway, you will find a “Donate” BlogBridge button as well.

We expect that this changeover will happen sometime today or tomorrow. Please send email or IM us with any questions or concerns!

Bill Ives, of the “Portals and KM” blog, recently wrote a piece describing how he gets value from BlogBridge’s support of reading lists. Bill also is the Topic Expert for our Knowledge Management Expert topic.

His post is really worth reading: “As I have written before, BlogBridge is my RSS aggregator. It is free and has some great features (disclaimer, I have no business connection with them, just a happy user).” Read Bill Ives’ whole piece!

I’m glad to say that we have added another topic expert in our Business and Professional category, this time about Branding Strategy.

As you can read in Derricks bio, “At my company, The Blake Project, I enjoy helping large and small growth oriented companies design, manage and build brands that drive profitable revenue growth through differentiated customer experiences.” that Derrick is recommending. Good stuff!

In his introduction you read some of Derrick’s thoughts on branding:

“…As you explore the topic of branding, my hope is that your take-away leads your brand to brand insistence. That is, your brand will be perceived to be the only viable solution for the customer’s need. Put another way, the customer will not pursue substitutes if your brand is not available. The brand establishes a consideration set of one, a place where customers move beyond being aware of your brand, preferring your brand, purchasing your brand, and being loyal to your brand…they insist on your brand!…” (from Branding Strategy Expert Topic Guide)

Derrick blogs at BrandingStrategyInsider.com

As you can imagine I have a phalanx of SmartFeeds scouring the net for anyone talking, good or bad, about BlogBridge. I post comments to threads and otherwise enjoy seeing where we are having an impact. Here are just a few excerpts from recent months:

From h0bbel’s web site, from a post called “How did I Miss Netvibes?”

“[snip…] I’m not ready to get rid of BlogBridge though, which still is my favorite Java application of all time (besides Gallery Remote of course), and to be honest BlogBridge performance has never been better than the v4.4 Weekly Build I’m currently running. On my Laptop, running Microsoft Vista Business, BlogBridge really performs well and I still love the centralized configuration/feed settings that I’ve praised before.[snip…]”

Des Walsh from Bussiness and Blogging, from a post called “RSS Readers: NewsGator and BlogBridge”

“[snip…] Another thing I like about BlogBridge is that they provide various lists of leading blogs to help set up a “guide” immediately. I still haven’t figured out how to import/export OPML files with BlogBridge and I am concerned to be able to do that. The online manual could be more immediately helpful on that.[snip…]

On the MarcNext blog, from a post called: “De Slimmer feedreader is in aantocht”:

“[snip…]Nu ben ik wat BlogBridge betreft erg gehecht aan mijn smartfeeds, dus om nu gelijk over te stappen naar bijvoorbeeld Feedeye vind ik wat te snel. Ik hoop daarom dat dergelijke functionaliteit straks in de meeste readers wordt ingebakken. Het zou het leven van een RSS-lezer een stuk aangenamer maken.[snip..]”

Oh, you don’t read Dutch??? Sorry

And, from D’Arcy Norman’s blog, from a post called “Heading back to BlogBridge”:

“[snip…]

I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.

I couldn’t do it.

[snip…]

So, I’m back to BlogBridge.  Ahhhh… that’s better. There’s no place like home…

[snip…]”