Yes, we’ve been busy building out the BlogBridge Topic Guides. Today we are announcing the start of a whole new department, called “Creativity / The Arts”. Take a look:

• Art News - a collection of blogs and feeds with news from the art world
• Photo Bloggers - lots of photographers like to show off their work in a blog
• Cartoons and Cartoonists - professional cartoonist Mark Anderson curates this collection
• Artists who Blog - many artists love to share their passion and show off work in progress and finished pieces
• Newspaper Comics - A fairly huge set of feeds of comics from newspapers around the world

And this is just the start. If you can suggest a Topic Expert on some creativity and arts related topic, please introduce her to us so we can try and entice them into joining forces with us.

Technorati Tags: Creativity, The Arts, art world, cartoonist

You may not know, and probably don’t care that BlogBridge is a Java application(***). Java is the underlying technology that allows this small band of fanatics to build a powerful product like BlogBridge and deliver it on Windows, Mac AND Linux.

Java is an awesome environment used by millions of users and developers. And yet Sun gives it away free. (Like you-know-who.) So there often has been speculation about whether Sun in fact would be able and willing to keep on investing in their Java empire.

Well Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, in a blog post entitled “The Rise of JAVA and the retirement of SUNW” puts any doubts to rest. In a rather long winded post, that ends up “burying the lead” we learn finally that:

“JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that’s inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). And so next week, we’re going to embrace that reality by changing our trading symbol, from SUNW to JAVA.”

That’s good news for us here at BlogBridge. Not that we were in serious doubt, but it’s great to see Sun so publicly restating and refreshing their commitment to Java.

*** Yeah, there are some wise crackers out there who will joke that they know it’s Java from the slowness or the memory footprint. Thanks. But really we are proud (and often amazed) at the performance we can get out of Java and the fact that we deliver a great product like this on Windows, Linux and Macintosh, every two weeks!

Technorati Tags: Java, Jonathan Schwartz

I am often asked who our experts are for the BlogBridge Topic Libraries. As you can see from this index, we have been able to attract experts in numerous topic areas, from Advertising to Zoology.

Actually we don’t have Zoology, yet, but it’s a nice A to Z story, don’t you think? Actually if you can put us in touch with someone who lives and breathes Zoology, that would be great! On the other hand, our expert on Advertising, Steve Hall, is a well known blogger and expert about advertising and the ad industry.

I recently saw this excellent post by blogger Joerg Kurt Wegner. I don’t know him but from his site I see that he is interested in Mining, Cheminformatics, Molecular Modelling, Bioinformatics, and Structure Based Drug Design. Wow! He’s also very interested in blogging and it’s impact or influence (good and bad) on people in his field.

So who are our experts and where do we find them? They are people like Joerg, who are clearly specialists in their field who have been bitten by the blogging bug. So, I immediately approached Joerg with a request and suggestion that he join forces with us and become a BlogBridge Topic Expert.

I encourage you to take a look at our blog topic library: it is always growing and is a wonderful showcase for the rich variety of top notch writers who blog about a topic they know and love.

Technorati Tags: Zoology, Advertising, Steve Hall, Joerg Kurt Wegner, Structure Based Drug Design

There are lots of goodies in this release. Most important is our new Photo Album view, which was covered in BlogBridge Photo Album View Greatly Improved. Here are some other less dramatic improvements that might be important for you:

• We cleaned up the layout of the Tools menu
• We added the ability for the Cleanup Wizard (do you know it? It’s under the Tools menu) to spare pinned articles and to kill old articles
• The uber-cool What’s Hot feature (do you know it? It’s on the Toolbar, all the way to the right) has been improved and gives even better results. Please share your experiences with us?

Do check out the BlogBridge Change History for the details.

In case you are new to this site, let me give you a quick explanation of our versions.

Every 2 weeks we release a (”weekly”) Development Release, which has a version number that looks like #.## or for example 5.10. This means that it’s the 10th development release after release 5.

Every “so often” we release what we call a Stable Release. They always have a version number that looks like this: #. or for example 5.0. (If we need to do quick patch on a stable release we will tack an additional number on, so for example 5.0.1.)

For most people we recommend that you run the newest Stable Release which as of now is 5.0.1. They are well tested, stable, and reliable. If you are a little adventurous and want to see the new features just as soon as we implement them, you might want to try our Development Releases. They are less thoroughly tested and will often have incomplete features. But they are almost always safe to use and won’t cause you any problems.

Here are some links that you might be interested in:

• General download page where we show you how and why to install on each platform.
• Download and install latest Windows Stable Release (5.0.1)
• Download and install latest Mac OS X Stable Release (5.0.1)
• Download and install latest Development Release (5.10)
• Change History where we list in gory detail all the changes in each release.

Technorati Tags: Photo Album

• BB - Core: Cleanup manager enhancements
• BB - GUI: Improved the layout of the Tools menu
• BB - GUI: Photo display brieft and full modes improved
• FL - Core: Added a function to post announcements for folder updates
• FL - Core: Added the module to check all items in the library for broken links
• FL - GUI: Converted some command icons into the textual links

Today’s weekly release will feature a really nice improvement of the BlogBridge photo album view. It turns out that there are lots of feeds which include a single graphic and then commentary about that graphic, for example check out IT IN place, a blog with beautiful art work. You can see it in the screenshot to the left.

BlogBridge’s photo album view is a really handy way to keep up with visually oriented blogs. And it’s pretty cool too!

Thanks to Life Rocks 2.0, who have honored us by selecting BlogBridge in their top ten RSS Readers.

Given the crowdedness of the space and really the excellent other products available, it’s always gratifying to be recognized!

And count on us to continue to be motivated and energized to expand and improve BlogBridge and continue to innovate with new products in to help you stay on top of what’s going on in the blogosphere.

A tasty preview: we’ve started preparing www.100topics.com and www.blogoverload.com. No don’t try clicking, there’s nothing there yet. But watch for an announcement!