There’s a new site in town, KillerStartups.com, and they’ve covered BlogBridge:

“BlogBridge can help zero in on the topics related to your search and eliminate what isnt in your search to guarantee that the blogs you end up reading are truly related to your filed of interest. Every week the site posts about what new features have been added if any and what news is going on regarding the company.” (from KillerStartups.com)

If you like BlogBridge, do us a favor and click on the KillerStartup link and vote for us. Thanks!

• BB - Core: Corrected recognition of the service level when giving user/pass during installation
• BB - Core: Added option (for plug-in manipulation) not to update Search Feeds automatically
• BB - Core: Fixed the bug with showing and not updating feeds (after sync-in)
• BB - Core: Improved What’s Hot link titles resolution algorithm
• BB - Core: Added Plug-in auto-deployment module to pre-install important plug-ins (BB-Connect)
• BB - GUI: Scrolling when mouse is over the pagination view
• BB - GUI: Improved mouse and keyboard navigation in What’s Hot / Find dialogs
• BB - GUI: Better HTML entities recognition in What’s Hot links titles
• BB - GUI: What’s Hot settings are stored between invocations
• BB - GUI: Added What’s Hot settings synchronization
• BB - GUI: Small controls in What’s Hot / Find dialogs
• BB - GUI: Updated images loading and caching to load last images first
• BB - GUI: Many pagination control fixes
• FL - Core: Added a background checker of all items for invalid or moved links with summary report over email
• FL - SEO: Added text-link-ads.com support with per-user “don’t show ads in my folders / items”
• FL - SEO: Tags to keywords, description to description
• FL - SEO: Adding recommended tags to keywords for expert folders / items
• FL - SEO: Created a clever robots.txt generation engine to let SE crawlers index libraries
• FL: Fixed wrong images for folders in search

In my post yesterday, “Happy Blogiversary”, I predicted some flogging with a wet noodle for anyone trying to say they knew what the first blog or blogger was. In their Wall Street Journal Article “Happy Blogiversary” the author made the mistake of identifying a specific date, place and time, and author of the first blog.

I sure don’t know the true answer. But it is a nice way to show off how hot What’s Hot has become.

Below you see part of the report from our new and improved “What’s Hot” feature. This is a new command in the BlogBridge toolbar, which analyzes all the blogs you read and tries to identify hot stories. What’s Hot debuted a week ago but has gotten lots of refinements in this release.

Wait for BlogBridge Development Release 5.9 on Friday to try it for yourself.

You see that it’s identified a series of stories in different blogs that appear to be commenting on the re-writing of blogging history (just as I predicted )

Yeah, that’s hot

We here at BlogBridge are always scouring the wires for interesting stories about the blog world. Today we bring you the Wall Street Journal that has a fun segment online to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the blog.

(And for you who are seasoned blogistas, you know that that anyone trying to pin down what or where or when the first blog was seen should be ready for a major flogging with a wet noodle.)

Still the article is a nice overview of the way the world views and relates to blogs:

“The consumption of blogs is often avid and occasionally obsessive. But more commonly, it is utterly natural, as if turning to them were no stranger than (dare one say this here?) picking one’s way through the morning’s newspapers. The daily reading of virtually everyone under 40 — and a fair few folk over that age — now includes a blog or two, and this reflects as much the quality of today’s bloggers as it does a techno-psychological revolution among readers of news and opinion.” (from Happy Blogiversary, Wall Street Journal)

And as you can see, not everyone is a fan:

“Notwithstanding the words of Tom Wolfe, who puts an elegant boot, below, into the corpus of bloggers, there are many more people today who would read blogs than disparage them.” (from Happy Blogiversary, Wall Street Journal)

To form your own opinion, here’s a new section in our BlogBridge Topic Library with all the blogs mentioned as favorites of the many celebrities interviewed for this article. Enjoy!

You might be surprised that the BlogBridge team keeps releasing another dev version every two weeks, but yup, here’s another one.

The truth is that we’ve become more and more reluctant to to the user interface, because while we think BlogBridge is the leading blog reader and aggregator for power users, we worry about things getting too powerful — and not easy to use.

And of course our dedicated users don’t lack for suggestions of their own! Take a look at the BlogBridge User Forums to see the action, and please keep them coming, ok?

Here’s a summary of what’s new in 5.8:

• BlogBridge Connect: Our first feature, delivered as a plug in. It is a way for us to communicate important messages to you directly in BlogBridge. To try it, just install the BlogBridge Connect plug in. I will write more about it soon.
• Translations: The tools and documentation for creating translations of our products have been redone. We are eagerly looking for someone to help us with our Spanish and French translations, as we have lots of users in each of those countries. Please contact me directly if you think you can help.
• Fit and Finish: Finally there have been numerous smaller UI fixes and keyboard shortcut additions. Please check out our History of BlogBridge Changes for the details.

As you may know, our current stable release is 5.0.1 and the majority of you are running that version. The bi-weekly development release is actually quite reliable and stable and if you are at all curious to try the latest latest developments, I really suggest you give it a try.

• BB - Core: Added new BlogBridge Connect feature to deliver news flashes (plug-in)
• BB - Core: Updated translation documentation
• BB - GUI: No jumps when pages is gradually loading images
• BB - GUI: Lots of What’s Hot enhancments
• BB - GUI: Added Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins, Shift-Del to text areas and fields
• BB - GUI: Adding a new guide before the selected
• BB - GUI: Enabled copying / moving feeds with Ctrl-C/V/X
• BB - GUI: Focusing article title in feed properties
• BB - GUI: Fixed trimming of article pub. date
• BB - PTB: Adding time to the publication date when posting to blogs
• BB - SmartFeed: Added Amazon Tag SmartFeed to search Amazon tags
• BB - SmartFeed: Fixed not updating SmartFeeds when new articles arrive
• FL: Added check for updates feature
• FL: Updated footer to have dynamic contacts text

Another very positive notice for BlogBridge, this one on the popular Business and Blogging blog by Des Walsh.

Des has embarked on a series of reviews of his 5 Favorite Newsreaders. Although there are 5 in the series, in the first post Des says:

“In the next post in this short series I look at BlogBridge, which is currently my default feed reader.” (from 5 Favorite Feed Readers)

In the post entitled 5 Favorite News Readers: 2 - BlogBridge” Des says:

“For me the main attraction is the way the information is organised and displayed. It’s easy to create categories of blogs and drop new feeds into the respective categories. I can scan very quickly the blogs and posts I want to check out and then either display a post within the reader or click on the permalinked post title to open the blog in question at the relevant post.” (from 5 Favorite News Readers: 2 - BlogBridge)

He also appreciates the ‘human touch’ (yes, indeed, we are human

“I also like the human touch. I like the fact that if a member has a challenge then Pito, or Alexey or another member of the team is going to care and going to do their best to help you solve it. After all, they, like us the members, are all info-junkies too!” (from 5 Favorite News Readers: 2 - BlogBridge)