Use the Cleanup Wizard to surgically clean up BlogBridge. The interface makes it clear: you can delete articles older than a certain age,  or just so a certain feed does not have more than a certain number of articles, while protecting if you want, unread and pinned articles. You can delete whole feeds that you have not looked at in a while or that have been dead for a while. There are actually even more options to allow you to easily control what BlogBridge keeps and what it throws out. Check the Cleanup Wizard command in the BlogBridge Tools menu and let us know what you think!

Check out this review of BlogBridge in Network World written by Mark Gibbs

Here are some excerpts to give you a taste:

I’ve tried various newsreaders over the last few years and none have really solved the problem of managing feed contents really effectively and, most importantly, doing so across multiple platforms. That is, until I found BlogBridge published by BlogBridge Inc. (from eview of BlogBridge in Network World.)

He likes the Pro subscription:

“The BlogBridge “Pro” subscription supports posting feed content as a link, an extract, or the whole article directly to your own blog (Drupal, Roller, WordPress and Movable Type are supported) as well as Twitter.” (from Review of BlogBridge in Network World.)

and the SmartFeeds:

“BlogBridge also offers what the publishers call “SmartFeeds” which are filters that create feeds from existing ones based on attributes that include search text in articles, title of articles, date and category, name of feed, name of guide (your groupings of feeds), and number of “starz.” (from Review of BlogBridge in Network World.

and Starz (which I am glad to hear because it’s my favorite and original differentiator in BlogBridge which I know is not as universally popular with the users of BlogBridge

“”Starz” are a built-in automatic rating system based on the frequency of posts, number of links in postings, click-throughs, and number of feed views – the last two attributes are determined from the aggregated behavior of BlogBridge users who have established accounts with the Web service.” (from Review of BlogBridge in Network World.

Yup, Mark likes it:

“If you’re a news junkie, BlogBridge will change the way you think about consuming news feeds and help you find the stuff you really want. I’ll give BlogBridge a “highly recommended.”" (from Review of BlogBridge in Network World.

You can read more about Mark Gibbs at his own web site and on LinkedIn.

Dear Users,

As you might have noticed, our server died an ugly death yesterday.

We have been moving heaven and earth to get it back up and we are almost there. Believe me, it’s been harrowing and it has led to us moving our operation to a brand new server which we are now in the process of provisioning.

Thank you very much for your patience. We will keep you posted.

Current Status: 99% of the way to full operation

We just learned that our forum.blogbridge.com user discussion forum has been totally overrun with spam and other illegal content. Given that most users seem to be satisfied with our email support (email us at support@blogbridge.com) we have decided to just take the whole forum off line. We trust that this will not be an inconvenience for you.

Please feel free to send us your questions and requests to support@blogbridge.com and we will follow up promptly.

A user asks:

“I want to subscribe to a list of rss feeds on a given topic, curate the article stream in some way and then have the articles come out as a RSS feed that I can feed into a publishing platform to be displayed across various platforms. Is that possible?”

Actually that’s a use case we worked on quite a bit. There are two scenarios, depending on your requirements, that you might want to use:

1. Using the BlogBridge ‘pub’ subscription (for blog publishers) you can publish the chosen articles to another blog server. That’s what I do myself all the time. After talking to customers we concluded that almost always when someone is curating, they want to be able to add a word or two (or a paragraph) of comment around the article they have chosen. So, we have very flexible formatting, choosing of part or all of the curated article and so on.

   The target is another blog (say a free wordpress blog) which then is subscribed to by your users/clients. Very flexible and powerful. You can have multiple target blogs (if you want to generate a curated stream for one client or population that’s different than others.) You can set up templates about what the result will look like. And we support all the popular blogging services.

2. Lower end solution: use tagging. We have built in support of delicious tagging. So you could tag the articles you are choosing with a unique tag in delicious and then have your audience subscribe to an rss feed of that tag. Works very well and does not require the ‘pub’ subscription.
3. Similar solution: use Twitter. We have direct integration with twitter so you can tweet your curated articles, which will include your comment plus a shortened link to the article in question. Also a very nice solution.

BlogBridge is an especially powerful tools for Blog Publishers and Blog Curators.

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.