• BB - Core: Plug-in framework
• FL - Core: Podcasts support (with a player)

Yes, sports fans, we’ve got a new release for you, BlogBridge 5.0! The next time you run BlogBridge it will automatically offer you a chance to update to BlogBridge 5.0.

N.B. Starting with BlogBridge 5.0 and the introduction of the BlogBridge service plans we’ve decided that it would be fair ask our users for a very small subscription fee to help us pay the bills. We still have the totally free option, with (currently) a limit of 300 feeds and 2 synchs per day. You can read the details in on the BlogBridge service plans page.

We remain committed to BlogBridge Desktop as a Free and Open Source project. This has always been and continues to be a labor of love. We hope if you like and use BlogBridge you will decide to continue to support our work.

Now to what’s new. The major new capabilities are around the Post to Blog capabilities, but actually there are several other new goodies.The most significant is that the new BlogBridge Service is now generally available, supporting the new “Post to Blog” commands. Depending on the your subscription plans, you will see this new command enabled, both on the context menu and on the Articles menu.

Also, for Publishing plan subscribers, we have a powerful new “Hide Duplicates” feature for SmartFeeds:

Yes, I did announce and describe it extensively a little while ago, but up to now it was only available to our “weekly” development release. For more details, take a look at this description of the new BlogBridge Service Plans. You may also be interested to learn how to Get Started with the BlogBridge Service.

Another fairly significant change is that before BlogBridge 5.0, the signup and access to the BlogBridge Service was through BlogBridge Desktop application (the original and still centerpiece of our offerings.)

From now on, new users sign up via this web site’s “My BlogBridge” link. If you don’t have a BlogBridge service account, get one now! While we’ve started to charge for some of the services, note that we still have a totally free level of service, which will suffice for many of our users.

But wait! There’s more new (from 4.0.1) capabilities in BlogBridge 5.0:

• Greatly improved startup speed and overall stability
• Integration with Firefox and Safari (can be registered as the RSS feed handler)
• No polling of hidden feeds
• Pin command available directly in Search results
• Pin status available when creating SmartFeeds
• Post to Blog for Base level subscribers
  • WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, JRoller Support
  • Minimal, brief and Full quoting of source article
• Post to Blog for Pub level subscribers
  • HTML and Rich Text mode editing
  • Smart duplicate removal in Smart Feeds
  • Post to multiple blogs in one click
  • Set a category to post to each blog
  • Set date of post
• GoogleNews SmartFeed

I won’t list all the smaller things - here is the complete history of all the changes from 4.0.1 to 5.0.

Look for our BlogBridge Release 5.0 in the next several days. You will get automatically updated, so just sit back and enjoy it. When we actually release it we will also post to this blog with some pointers to the highlights of the new release.

Also, I will be attending O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (aka “ETECH”) in San Diego (USA) next week and will be getting together a meetup or BOF of BlogBridge users and others with an interest. If you want to join me in San Diego, please send me an email, and I will get in touch with the where and when.

Did you know that BlogBridge has a nice “Pin” feature? As a little background, the normal behavior of BlogBridge is that old articles are deleted. Feeds are held to a maximum number of old articles so that you don’t end up saving a copy of every blog in the universe, which would be wasteful. You can control that number, both globally and on an individual feed basis.

But what about those articles that are really great and you do want to preserve forever? That’s where the pin command comes in. You can just “pin” the article (as in “pin it to the wall”) and this way it won’t get cleaned up in the normal course of things.

Take a look at the brief little movie to see some cool other things you can do with those pinned articles.

BlogBridge gathers anything you want that has an RSS feed and makes it all easy to access, organize, review, and even share. While there are other tools that (sort of) do this, BlogBridge is specifically designed to help people who,

1. Want or need to read a lot of blogs or online news without a lot of hassle; and
2. People who want to monitor specific topics, trends, ideas, or information online.

BlogBridge is also a great tool for anyone who needs to stay ahead of the info curve in their field—even if you aren’t reading blogs at this time.

For power bloggers, publishers, and taggers, BlogBridge offers advanced features to let them further share what they are learning.

So if you should know everything about neuroscience, pork bellies, real estate in Manhattan, gene therapy, wireless technology, Paris Hilton, the auto industry, the US Congress, IRS rulings, Microsoft, etc. BlogBridge could be just what you need.

BlogBridge and BlogBridge Library are great tools to use to keep your teams and employees informed and sharing a common knowledge base—whatever operating systems they use, wherever they are. Track trends news competitors and prices that affect your operations. If you don’t have the time or resources to build your own collections of relevant feeds, BlogBridge can build one for you.

BlogBridge is designed for people who need to follow many blogs and rss feeds. If all you do online is read the front page of the NYTimes, follow the Red Sox, and read DailyKos then you probably don’t need Blogbridge. But if you read five or ten papers, a dozen or more blogs, track multiple projects, get lots of email alerts or newsletters…if you follow news about clients, industries or companies…if you run marketing, PR, fundraising or political
campaigns…well, BlogBridge could really make your life a lot easier.

Blogbridge lets you to stay up to-the-minute on what you need to know–whether that’s the latest in proteomics, aerospace, encryption, ebay auctions, celebrity gossip, movie deals, or stock prices. If you need to follow specific topics in computer sciece or law, or trends in art or real estate..if you are a collector or if you run a retail business…if you teach a class, engage in research, train employees, or provide professional services, then Blogbridge can help you stay on top of your discipline and interests and actually give you a competitive advantage.

If you aren’t using Blogbridge now, consider the fact some of your competitors probably are.

So save yourself a few headaches. Get all those emails updates out of your inbox and into a feed reader. News and information is increasingly shared through RSS feeds so why not use a terrific aggregator that will grow with your information needs–no matter what computer or operating system you have now or plan to switch to, one that holds on to your collection of feeds and gives you access wherever you are, whatever computer you use.

Blogbridge gets more powerful and interesting with our regular updates. And best of
all? Blogbridge is free!

We are trying something new. I will be recording a series of short (very short) screen casts showing off one or the other feature of BlogBridge. I cutely, have been calling them “Fast Facts.”

Truthfully, and as many software people bemoan, I bet many of our users overlook things which they would find very valuable. This is one more tool that we will be using to get y’all exposed to some of the goodies.

So… If you are a BlogBridge user you may have noticed the cool little colorful graphic next to the name of each and every feed. Did you notice it?

Watch this short (about 100 seconds) movie to understand what the heck it is supposed to be telling you!

Oh and by the way, we will be launching BlogBridge 5.0 in about 1 or 2 weeks, and there will be a series of Screencasts showing off the coolness of the new publishing features in live Technicolor, and so these posts are to whet your appetite and receive feedback on this way of talking about what comes next.

An interesting review of 8 so-called "meme trackers" — read this post from franticindustries - web 2.0, social networking, IT technology trends.:

"[snip…] A news source that has lately risen in popularity is an automated news aggregator, or a memetracker - a website that gathers news from many sources (usually RSS feeds) and sorts it according to time of publishing, relevance, importance, number of inbound links or other factors. The important part here is there is very little or no interference by living editors; news items are chosen and sorted by an algorithm, automatically.[snip…]"

(from: Big memetracker roundup - 8 news aggregators reviewed)

John Newton has a very interesting bit about the connections between Game Theory and Open Source. Check out this post from Content Log:

“I don’t expect Game Theory to be a predictive model, but I do expect it to be a descriptive model explaining why certain things work the way they do in open source. We now have a lot of data from Linux, MySQL, JBoss and the various BitTorrent clients. With this data, I am hoping to be able to understand the following:

(from: Game Theory and Open Source)