Tasha Saecker is the Director of the Menasha Public Library in Wisconsin. She wrote a nice post about BlogBridge. For example, “I like that when a site with a feed is referenced, BlogBridge tells me if I already subscribe to the feed by coloring it either green for already subscribed or red for a new feed that I don’t subscribe to.” Thanks Tasha! You should read her blog.

We at BlogBridge are still going strong; admitedly at a different scale than Google Reader, but from what I can gather from our stats, there’s a cadre of users who continue to need a powerful and scalable blog and feed reader with good connections to twitter, facebook, blog reading and so on, and that’s still BlogBridge.

Here’s an interesting article from ReadWriteWeb about their take on what’s happening in the world of blog aggregation and reading.

Mike Jones of Sales 2.0 had this to say about BlogBridge recently:

“I’m following a couple of hundred different subjects and companies and it’s a great way to find out what’s going in the market place to help make decisions and to discover key information in time to react or make a decision.” (from Sales 2.0)

As you all know, we’ve been running a survey of our users about their interest in an iPhone BlogBridge application. In fact, even before getting the final results, we began work on it and it is about half done at this point. Here are the results of our survey, so far:

As you can see, the large majority of our users (around 80%) are either not interested, or would ask for it to be free. This is understandable, given that the majority of our users themselves are using the Freemium version of BlogBridge. This is always as we intended it: BlogBridge is aimed at people with a major info glut problem, and those folks are not the majority. Those folks are happy paying users.

However, this does pose a conundrum for us, the maintainers of BlogBridge. After all you can imagine that developing BlogBridge has not been free, and while we constantly support and add features to the product, we too have to put food on the table and have a roof over our heads.

So we regret to have to say, that at least for the moment, we are suspending work on the BlogBridge iPhone application until we find a way to fund further development. We aren’t talking about that much funding, really, around $5,000 would do it.

We will be trying to get that funding elsewhere; another possibility is that a qualified iPhone open source developer gets in touch with us; we would be willing to put the new code for BlogBridge for iPhone under an open source license, just like BlogBridge itself is today. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Just a quick note that we just released BlogBridge 6.7. It’s a small maintenance release with a few small features, and also a Mac Snow Leopard compatibility issues. You can see the list of changes here. For current BlogBridge users, the update should be automatic. Please contact us if you experience any difficulties.

If you are not familiar with BlogBridge, check this out.

• Updates and fixes to Cleanup Wizard
• Updates to the SmartFeed properties dialog
• Added manual update mode option to feed properties
• Added mobility flag to guide properties (for BlogBridge iPhone)
• Resolved Snow Leopard compatibility issues

I am going to be starting to post blogs that I discover that are particularly good or interesting, just as an added service to BlogBridge users.

The Virology Blog, “About Viruses and Viral Disease”, sounds a bit of a downer doesn’t it? But it is well written and informative and quite relevant today. I recommend it.

Note: If you are using BlogBridge then you can simply right click on the link above and choose “Subscribe to This Feed” and you will subscribe to that feed. One click! Cool eh?

Check this post Why Twitter Matters & The Left Should Be Nervous from techPresident:

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here’s one example courtesy of TechPresident’s own Micah Sifry.

“It’s positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their “dominance” on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2″

The very first time I saw a comment like that, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online. Average: 0 Your rating: None (from: Why Twitter Matters & The Left Should Be Nervous)

I continue to follow interesting blog posts about whether Twitter ‘matters‘ or not. What do you think? And how useful is the Twitter support (both posting and following) on BlogBridge for you?

Here’s an interesting perspective from Slate:

“[...]But RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day?[...]” (from Slate Magazine)

Of course we here at BlogBridge strenuously disagree

• If you need to read hundreds of blogs, say as part of your job, then there’s no other choice than using a powerful reader like BlogBridge
• Also, don’t think as blog reading like email reading. There’s no reason to read every single post in blogs you care about! You can skim, you can use SmartFeeds to identify posts that talk about what you care about and just read those, you can rate and rank your feeds.
• Remember also that RSS readers nowadays are much more than RSS readers. BlogBridge especially sits as kind of your high productivity cockpit in the middle of the avalanche of content, blogs, news, tweets, tags, and so on and so forth, and also allows you to be very efficient about contributing and responding back over each of those channels.

So yes, if you read 5 or 10 feeds then an RSS Reader is mostly a pain, but if you are required to keep up with hundreds and even thousands of feeds, then something like BlogBridge is priceless!

Yeah! we are rightfully proud of our new support for Twitter. We offered it because our users need it and want it. The truth is that personally I am not a big fan of twitter. So I was amused today to read this post Buzzword: Twitter quitter from CR Electronics Blog:

I confess: I am a Twitter quitter. Despite the meteoric rise of this micro-blogging site among news organizations, celebrities, and politicians, I found it remarkably easy to stop using it. At first I felt guilty. I read newspapers online. I’m on Facebook. I text (albeit not with those insipid abbrevi8shnz). Twitter should have come naturally to me. It didn’t.