Source: Wools, License

Tonight, we will be moving a database to a new set of servers. The scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 9.30 from 9:00 PM PST to 11:00 PM PST. During this time, Bloglines will not be available.

- Eric Engleman & The Bloglines Team

Last week, I met a big name blogger who is also a dedicated user of Bloglines.
I couldn’t help but notice his iPhone typing skills. He was clearly pounding out
at 40 words per minute which is super-fast on the iPhone. I was really excited to
hear his impressions on iBloglines, our iPhone optimized version of Bloglines.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t heard of iBloglines. I was crestfallen. I realized I needed
to do a better job telling Blogliners about our great products.

No better time than the present to remind everyone of the great Bloglines mobile
products. We have 2 major product sets: iBloglines for iPhones and Bloglines for
mobile phones.

iBloglines for iPhones – located at i.bloglines.com

	Pin – Save the story for when you get back to your Mac or PC.
	Email Articles – Sharing is fun.
	Search – Find the latest buzz with our blog and feed search.
	Auto Refresh of “My Library” – No need to hit refresh to get the latest updates.
	Hide Images – We know EDGE is slow, and your time is valuable.
	Preferences – Personalizing is essential. Our Blogliners love to personalize their experience so they can optimize their feed reading flow.

Bloglines for Mobile – located at m.bloglines.com and m.beta.bloglines.com

Why two different versions of Bloglines for mobile phones? One is Bloglines Classic
(m.bloglines.com) which has been around for years.
The other is our new beta product (m.beta.bloglines.com)
which has the latest set of enhancements.

Bloglines has had a leading mobile feed reader for the last couple of years. It’s always been one of our key product strengths. So we were really excited to make our mobile product even better. We were busy over the summer re-writing the mobile code from the ground up. A new version of mobile is available as part of the Bloglines Beta Releases. Go to m.beta.bloglines.com on your cell phone. When we feel it’s ready, we’ll make it available on Bloglines Classic. Key Features

• Start Page – Your Bloglines Start Page is displayed at the top of the screen. This way you can pull your favorite feeds to the top.
• Pin (formerly known as Keep New) – Sometimes you want to save that special post to read later when you’re not on the go.
• Pagination – Instead of loading all of your posts, we parse out the posts into smaller bundles to fit into the memory constraints of cell phone browser. This has numerous benefits including improved speed, better reliability and safer “mark read” behavior.

Enjoy

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Source: Wools, License

This evening, the Bloglines Plumber and Team will be implementing network upgrades in our data center. The scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 11/27 from 8:00 PM PST to 10:00 PM PST. During this time, Bloglines will not be available.

- The Plumber and The Bloglines Team

The Event

Emails were sent recommending several posts on a Chinese Blog via the “send a post to a friend” feature on Bloglines. The email ended with a signature from “The Bloglines Team.” The emails were not sent by anyone associated with the Bloglines Team.

The Actions Taken

We monitored our logs and suspended the spammer’s IP address restricting their usage of Bloglines. In addition, on Monday 11/19/07, we briefly shut down the “send email” feature on Bloglines to further monitor the situation.

FYI

Bloglines sends out email to our subscribers for purposes specific to operating Bloglines (registration verification, change password, change of terms of service and other policies, significant product announcements, etc) Most product announcements can be found on the Bloglines News Feed. We take your privacy carefully and will protect our customers from spam.

Take Care.

-Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Here are some key questions to determine if your right for our customer research:

• New to feeds and Bloglines in the past year.
• Consider yourself a non-techie.
• Willing to do some “homework” about 10 minutes a day for a few days.
• Have broadband.
• Live in the Bay Area – a must.
• Willing to meet with our researcher for 90 minutes during the week of 11/29 to 12/7.

Modest compensation will be provided for you time.

Since we know that Bloglines attracts a wide set of people, we want to get a good mix – all ages, home or work users. So we’ve created a short (5 minute) survey to help us find the folks who best represent the Bloglines audience. In turn, we’ll contact you to arrange a meeting with our researcher. If you’re interested, please check out the survey.

Thanks so much!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

“Pitchfork: Today” skyrocketed 790,000 ranks. That’s right 790,000 ranks to land at 448. We double-checked the numbers and they are correct. Remember, we have millions of feeds in our database, so it is possible to jump thousands of ranks in one week. However, we will consider new ways to report this.

“Sew, Mama, Sew” continued to move its way up 352 rankings.

Confessions of a Pioneer Woman who debuted last week moved up another 303 ranks to land at Rank: 697.

@IT broke into the top 1000 last week with a big push from our Japanese Blogliners.

Search Engine Journal rose with a combination of news and helpful how-to articles like, “10 Places to Fine Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable.“

- Eric Engleman & the Bloglines Team

As people who not only work on Bloglines, but use Bloglines, you can be assured that we’re monitoring the situation closely and will put improvements in place to prevent downtime in the future.

- Eric Engleman & the Bloglines Team

It’s Faster

Most people have commented on how fast the Bloglines Beta is, much faster than the classic site. However, a web site can never be too fast! Will, Bjorn and Ben have been reviewing the front-end code looking for

Sew, Mama, Sew! debuts this week in the Bloglines Top 1000, climbing 790 spots from last week to claim the title of Biggest Mover. It leapt over top feeds like USATODAY.com Travel – Top Stories and the Drudge Report. Other feeds on the move include Marc Andreessen’s blog.pmarca.com, Design*Sponge, and MIT’s Technology Review Feed. Coming in at 1000 and debuting for the first time is 1000 Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. It’s a great example of a independent voice that has attracted a strong community. Pioneer Woman has great stories and sweet photos (we love the cinnamon rolls.)

Why the Bloglines Top 1000?

People ask us all the time about what Blogliners read. We’ve had the Bloglines Top 200 for the last couple of years, but wanted to highlight even more independent voices. We felt this was important because many have been lamenting the demise of blogging. As you can see, there are a number of great blogs and even more on the way.Blogliners subscribe to tech feeds like Slashdot, Gizmodo and Boing-Boing, however, Blogliners also subscribe to non-tech feeds like Comics, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day, Yarn Harlot, New Urban Legends and Cute Overload (a staff favorite). The Bloglines Top 1000 covers a wide spectrum of sites. Be sure to spend some time perusing the list; it’s a great way to see what your fellow Blogliners are reading.

How do you calculate the Bloglines Top 1000?

We don’t want to go into too much detail, but at the core, we’re tracking the number of “active” subscribers who interact with a feed during a specific time period. We’re assuming some individuals will attempt to game the system, so we’re going to keep the actual method somewhat quiet for now. Be sure to not though, we are tracking individual feed URLs, so some sites may have multiple listings.

Do feeds in the default packages rise to the top?

Default feeds or “Quick Picks” receive additional promotion which do cause them rise to the top. Many of the our current packs are a bit old and we’re in the process of updating the packs as part of our redesign, based on feedback from Blogliners.

Does the Bloglines Top 1000 illustrate any larger trends?

Yes, we think so. Feeds are being generated by a wide-variety of sites and are being consumed by an ever broader set of people; they’re not just for blogs or just for the technically inclined.

Does this herald the end of blogging?

Contrary to what some may say, no. People crave social connection; blogging will continue.

Is Bloglines attacking Technorati’s final stronghold?

Not at all. Bloglines has had a listing of top feeds for several years, though it used to only be the top 200. We’re updating the rankings and our methodology as part of our redesign.

• OpenID – Bloglines Beta and Bloglines Classic will both support OpenID. Going forward we’ll support consuming OpenID, OpenID 2.0 and are investigating the use of other Open Standards such as oAuth and APML.
• Mobile – Bloglines Beta now has a new version of Bloglines Mobile with additional features such as the “Start Page”, “Pin” and improved browser support.
• New Personalization Preferences – Bloglines Beta has added several new personalization features as well as implementing support for the current feed reading personalization features.

We’re going to keep the pace up and continue releasing features left and right.

Enjoy!!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Today is our first release devoted to supporting OpenID for Bloglines Classic and Bloglines Beta. In the near future, Bloglines will also support consuming OpenIDs and OpenID 2.0 which was just released this week.

Now our more technical users will know right way what’s going on and will be excited. In that case, you can go to id.bloglines.com and get started. Note – OpenID is just the beginning of us working with true open standards. Other formats getting our attention include oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). For the rest of you, let me outline a little bit about OpenID and what it will offer you in the future.

OpenID allows you to create an identity online and use that identity to login to any OpenID supported site. In other words, you will no longer need to create a new username and password for every single website. How many times have you gone to a site and forgotten your login. You might ask yourself, was the username “joe578″ or “joejoe” or “bigjoe” or “joeanne?”

Now you can imagine that if your favorite sites allowed you to login with a single ID you would be able combine services and create some pretty cool mashups. You would be able to pick and choose the sites you like to use and the features you want.

While OpenID is getting some momentum from major sites who have offered OpenIDs, it is still very early. So in the meantime, you will still need multiple IDs. But keep looking for the OpenID symbol. You will see it popping up more and more.

If you’re looking to get better informed about OpenID you can check out the OpenID Foundation or a few of the bloggers who cover the topic.

• Identity Woman
• Simon Willison’s Weblog
• David Recordon’s Blog
• Identity 2.0 Europe
• Talking Web X.0

Enjoy!

- Rob Emanuele and the Bloglines Team

Bloglines has had a leading mobile feed reader for the last couple of years. It’s always been one of our key product strengths. So we were really excited to make our mobile product even better. We were busy over the summer re-writing the mobile code from the ground up. A new version of mobile is available as part of the Bloglines Beta Releases. Go to m.beta.bloglines.com on your cell phone. When we feel it’s ready, we’ll make it available on Bloglines Classic. Key Features

• Start Page – Your Bloglines Start Page is displayed at the top of the screen. This way you can pull your favorite feeds to the top.
• Pin (formerly known as Keep New) – Sometimes you want to save that special post to read later when you’re not on the go.
• Pagination – Instead of loading all of your posts, we parse out the posts into smaller bundles to fit into the memory constraints of cell phone browser. This has numerous benefits including improved speed, better reliability and safer “mark read” behavior.

Enjoy!

- Kelvin Nishikawa and the Bloglines Team

Today’s release focuses on the personalization settings to optimize your feed reading experience. We have a combination of something old, something new, something borrowed and of course, the site is blue.

Where to go?

Look in the header and you’ll see the word “settings.” Click on it. The personalization settings page will appear.

What’s New?

• Mark Individual Posts as Read – You can now choose between Bloglines Classic or Bloglines Beta mark read behavior. You can either mark individual posts as read or mark the entire folder as read.  The current default is to mark individual feeds read. We’ll continue to monitor the comments around this setting closely. We know this is very important to our long-time Blogliners. In addition, I want to thank those who gave us feedback commented in the forums or posted on the web. Note – we want to make sure the people who have stood by Bloglines continue to do so. So we’re listening to you all.
• Remember View – Many people like to have a single view across all of their feeds.  This way there is consistency for feed reading. However, some have discovered the beauty of selecting different views for different feeds. For example, many like to read feeds with lots posts in quick view whereas comic feeds look better in Full View.  To each his own. The current default is to have all feeds stick with one view.
• Use Feed CSS – CSS Support can be turned on or off. CSS means we will deliver the feed in the style as defined by the publisher. The current default is to have CSS Support on.

What’s Old?

• Phone and Mobile settings – Fine tune your experience to make the most when you’re on the go.
• User settings such as creating a user name which is necessary to establish an OpenID with Bloglines
• Change email and password.

Now Something a little Different

• Sort Oldest/Sort Newest – You’ll notice this no longer a global preference available from the settings page. Now when you click sort Oldest/Sort News is changes the sorting view for all feeds.

We appreciate all the support you’ve given us over the years.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Why Do Publishers use CSS?

Most publishers use CSS to ensure content is designed consistently across browsers. If the publisher uses CSS in their feed, you’ll see the publishers style-sheet.

What does this mean for me?

You’ll see the content as the publisher designed it. A good example brought to our attention is the use of the “float” tag. Many bloggers use this tag to wrap text around an image. In the past, we wouldn’t wrap the text around the image. Now we do. There are lots of other examples of how the content will be displayed a little differently. A full list of all of the CSS style attributes we support is located here.

For the most part everyone, will benefit because most publishers attempt to make their feeds readable for feed readers.  In addition, we figure that the people who track a few of their friends’ feeds will probably like to see more for their friends “style” in their feed reader.  However, some publishers might make stylistic decisions which might make it hard for people to scan content quickly (small grey typeface on a black-background). That’s why we built an option to turn this CSS Support off. If the publisher’s design style is making it hard for you to scan and read your feeds, just to go Account Settings, Feed Options and turn off the CSS Support.

We want our Blogliners and bloggers to be happy.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

PS: If this text is blue then your reader supports CSS.

The latest launch offers up Inline Editing of Feeds and Folders. We pushed it out last night.  It looks like we were caught by Nathan Weinberg.Here’s a quick summary.

Inline Edit Feeds and Folders – You can change the feed or folder title name and set individual feed/folder settings such as display updated items,display in Bloglines notifier, display in Bloglines Mobile and of course setyour privacy settings for your feed or folder.   See screenshot below.

You might ask, “What does it mean to set my privacy settings for a feed or folder?” If you have your settings as public, your feed library is available to the world. Here’s an example of a part of my feed library so you can see what I read.

The next set of releases will feature personalization preferences including:

• New preferences allowing you to select different read/unread modes (Classic or Beta)
• Bloglines Mobile
• “Clippings” which will be renamed “Saved.”

We’ll keep you posted as we get closer.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Source cohdra

Last week we launched our beta site and it looks like many of you noticed.The overall response was exceptionally favorable, but one topic was lost in the excitement: the site is stillunder construction!Many people thought we were done. On the other hand, a number of our classic Blogliners pointed out several of their favorite features missing or not implemented quite right.  Both parties are right. If the beta currently fulfills your needs, great move right in. If it doesn’t fulfill your needs right now, don’t fret, we still have a large number of features to implement and a few features to refine. Take your time.

We’ve been listening to our core users and rolled out several features from Bloglines Classic which were frequently requested by our Blogliners.Keep an eye out for these new icons:

	Keep as New – retitled “Pin” – This feature temporarily saves a postin the reading view.  It’s very useful for when you see a large post, but don’t have enough time to read the post.
	Email this – One of the great things about a feed reader is sharing all of the great posts you discover.  Click on the email button at the bottom of a post and you can send those especially interesting posts to a friend.

We’ve also implemented a couple of other features available in the current site.

	Help – We’ve implemented a dynamic help site using Right Now Technologies.It’ll allows us to create help articles on the fly. We’re also going to experiment with pointing out to great help content created by our user community. So if we see a great tutorial someone has written, we just mightlink to you.
	Hotkeys – The majority of hotkeys are working: “j” – advance forward in the reading view “k” – move backwards in the reading view “r” – refresh left pane “s” – advance to the next feed “f” – advance to the next folder “A” – mark your selected feed or folder as read “n” – toggle Pin – different in Classic “o” – open article in new window – different in Classic

I’ve included a couple of screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

We’ll continue to listen to Blogliners in theforums and across the web. Our next set of features we’re working on will include editing feed subscription preferences and creation of additional beta preferences that will allow you to configure the beta to handle read/unread posts just like in classic Bloglines.

We’ll keep you all posted as we get closer. Again thanks for the feedback.

– Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team.

Photo Courtesy of StockVault

Wow! We were a little overwhelmed by the positive response our Beta received earlier in the week.We expected a few in the tech-set to write reviews, but never imagined the out-pouring of excitement. I thought I would share some of the high-points.

• Read Write/Web did an exceptionally detailed review and here’s a little except,”Bloglines has me back as a fan!”
• Even the competition likes Bloglines Beta. Chris Wetherall of Google Reader described Bloglines as, “Wicked Cool.“
• 3,000 posts were written across the web. Most of these from Blogliners excited about the return of Bloglines.  I love you Blogliners!
• Lots of people were and continue to discuss future releases of Bloglines in our Forums.

But we also wanted you to know that we heard another message—Don’t take too long to release additional features!

We’ll be listening to you and announcing additional features going forward.In fact, our next feature slated for release is “Keep as New.”This was the single most-requested item from active Blogliners. We’re workingon it right now. We’ll keep you posted on this and other releases as we getcloser.

Cheers!

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Blogliners we’re proud to introduce a betaof our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We’re inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.

The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

Picture by Brian Solis.

You know a conference is going to be good when the first person you run into is one of your power users. ForGnomedex 2007,my first conference as the new GM of Bloglines, I hoped to meet many Bloglines fans, and sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed.Mike Davidson, CEO ofNewsvine, who says hissecond most important thing in life is Bloglines, got me started off in style We chatted and he told me some of his favorite features and the way he uses Bloglines. He likes the hack by John Hicks for a Mac-like interface.

Later in the day, I got to meet Stan James,Founder and CTO of Lijit. Friends told me to be sure to talk to him. He’s a bit of a wunderkind who got VC interest in his PHD dissertation. Also, he’s a big fan of Bloglines and has been analyzing public Bloglines data and talking with other researchers for a while now.

On Saturday, I was spacing out for a moment when I noticed the person in front of me scanning through loads of feeds at light speed. Once I noticed the Bloglines logo, I knew we had to chat. It turned out to beArieanna Schweber, a long-time Bloglines user. We chatted for a bit and she pointed out a few things she would like to enhance in the future. She also works atB5 who is looking tohire bloggers.

I’ve been busy the last couple of months working with the team to define our next major releases. We’ve been talking to Blogliners and charting the next generation version of feed readers. I look forward to meeting all of the big fans of Bloglines at future conferences and of course in our user forums.

We’ll keep you posted on key events going forward. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.

Cheers.

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

	Pin – Save the story for when you get back to your Mac or PC.
	Email Articles – Sharing is fun.
	Search – Find the latest buzz with our blog and feed search.
	Auto Refresh of “My Library” – No need to hit refresh to get the latest updates.
	Hide Images – We know EDGE is slow, and your time is valuable.
	Preferences – Personalizing is essential. Our Blogliners love to personalize their experience so they can optimize their feed reading flow.

Have Fun!

- The Bloglines Team

Thanks to our team, I can present to you iBloglines,optimized for the iPhone. iPhoners, fire up your browsers and go toi.bloglines.com.Then touch/tap your screen to feed-reading heaven.

As a preview here’s a screenshot of iBloglines.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

For those of you who MAY have noticed a small hiccup or two, there’s a simple reason for it: Some of the new services we rolled out last week have been restarting due to a small glitch in our network protocol.

These hiccups rarely occur and last a very short amount of time–less than one second. Even so, we wanted you to know that we have tracked down the issue and fixed the problem.

We’re sorry about the inconvenience and will continue to monitor the situation.

-The Bloglines Team

-The Bloglines Team

Launching and Learning

As we wrote when we launched, we built the Image Wall as a cool, experimental, demonstration of the diversity of visual content that appears in syndicated feeds at any moment in time. Sure some of the images turn out to be awful, but some turn out to be great art and either way you can instantly see the diversity. We found that to be pretty amazing.

Nevertheless, we recognized that the Image Wall, as a reflection of the feeds in Bloglines (and thus a reflection of the Web itself) would not be appropriate for everyone. We took steps to mitigate the potential offensiveness, but still allow for the fascinating diversity to shine through.

Helping Our Audience Protect Theirs

However, we now realize we didn’t take into proper consideration how the Image Wall might impact educators, librarians and other people who have a responsibility for limiting access to adult material. Many of these good folks are users and even advocates of Bloglines. They form a community that we respect and admire. For them, simply making the personal choice not to view the Image Wall after reading the disclaimer is not sufficient to satisfy their obligations to those they are charged with protecting.

These valid concerns place the Image Wall squarely in the middle of the classic tension between “freedom of expression” and “freedom from expression”. It’s not a tension unfamiliar to libraries, schools (or, for that matter a search company), as each struggles to strike the right balance between access and restriction.

Over the past week, with the help and advice of many of you, we’ve been working to strike that balance for the Image Wall and the users of Bloglines. We feel we’ve found it.

Naming a Solution

Effective today, Bloglines will move the Image Wall to its own, new domain at http://www.bloglinesimagewall.com. Now, any school, library, parent/guardian or third party filtering service can add this full domain to their list of restricted domains to be blocked.

If/when the Image Wall URL is selected by a computer that has blocked www.bloglinesimagewall.com the page will NOT appear. It’s that simple. Blocking that domain will not impact the continued use of the Bloglines service.

We believe that those most concerned about access restrictions will have filtering software on their computers, and this change should make it easy to permanently opt-out of the Image Wall for all the computers under their control.

Furthermore, to better ensure that the Image Wall is appropriately restricted, we have contacted each of the major filtering services and asked that www.bloglinesimagewall.com be added to their list of adult websites. We ask those of you who belong to this community assist us in getting the word out to anyone who should have this information.

Finding the Right Balance – With Your Help

We hope that in making these changes we’ve struck the correct balance between information access and restriction. It has always been our intention to serve everyone who uses and relies on Bloglines, whether they choose to view the Image Wall, or whether, like thousands of educators and librarians, they may wish to restrict the Image Wall to protect those under their responsibility.

We will continue to closely monitor how this solution works out and, as always, your feedback is (and has been) tremendously appreciated.

–The Bloglines Team

Here’s the deal. Bloglines indexes zillions of pages every hour — and just as many images. The Bloglines Image Wall picks up these images as they come in and places them into a constantly updated grid.

You’ll never see the Wall the same way twice – in fact, it changes right before your eyes. Curious, funny, challenging, good, bad, and ugly – it’s all there. The variety alone is fascinating.

It’s a great way to see what’s happening in the blogosphere at any moment in time. And each image is clickable, taking you to its source blog or feed in Bloglines with a handy subscribe link at the top if you like what you see. The Image Wall is a whole new way to discover new content. It’s interesting — sometimes mesmerizing — and just plain fun. See for yourself!

-The Bloglines Team

Let us know what you like, don’t like, are having difficulty with, what you spilled on your keyboard while checking the Penny Arcade feed… We, and your fellow Bloglines users, are here for you. Check it out.

If you’re reading this, you’re already drinking the Bloglines Kool-Aid. So how about mixing up a few batches with us?

We’re looking to add two more incredibly talented people to our Bloglines team: specifically a Bloglines Director and a Senior UI Engineer. Interested – or know someone who might be?

Join and help us make Bloglines THE home page for the 21st Century.

-The Bloglines Team

-The Bloglines Team

Playlists lets you create short groupings of feeds to access from your main list. Create as many as you like, and use them to personalize your Bloglines experience that much more. Create them, change them, even delete them–all without changing your original “tree” of feeds. What song playlists are to your MP3 library, Bloglines Playlists are to your Bloglines blogs & feeds.

Want a quick look of those Playlists you just created? That’s what Glimpse is for. Click on one of your Playlists in your left nav and you’ll see the first five posts for every feed in that Playlist. Don’t like the order of your feeds? Drag and drop ‘em until you do. It’s easy. Plus, you can set one Playlist up as a default–and it’ll be the first thing you see every time you launch Bloglines.

Playlists and Glimpse are two more ways we’re working to make your Bloglines experience easier–and just maybe, a little more fun. Have any questions? Let us know!

– The Bloglines Team

-The Bloglines Team

-The Bloglines Team

We’d like to take the credit for this handy feature, but it was our compadres at the Mozilla Foundation who built this into their fine browser.

Don’t forget that we also have the same one-click subscription available forInternet Explorer 7!

-The Bloglines Team

Just look for the big orange RSS button that appears in your IE 7 toolbar. Click on it and you’re done – you’ve just subscribed to that feed in your Bloglines account.

All you need is the new Bloglines Browser Plug-in.

Thanks to the folks at Microsoft for giving us the opportunity to develop this time-saving shortcut for you. Prefer a different browser? Watch this space. Like one-click subscription, you’ll barely have to wait.

- The Bloglines Team

- The Bloglines Team

• We no longer update the entire left pane when the unread or “kept as new”counts change. Now the counts update in place with a fading yellow indicator.The result is a faster, more pleasant way to cruise through your feeds, especially for those quick on the hot keys.
• We’ve decreased the time between automatic updates to your unread counts so you don’t have to press the “r” hot key quite so often.

We hope you enjoy the changes. As always, if you have any feedback, feel free to let us know either via our contact form or by putting up a blog post containing the phrase “bloglines freedbacking”.

- The Bloglines Team

- The Bloglines Team

When you click on a link while reading a blog post in Bloglines Mobile, Skweezer will compress and reformat the content so you get it faster and better looking on your small screen. As you surf, the content will continue to be skweezed. Hints & bonus features:

• Click on the “Hide Images” link at the bottom of the page and skweezed content will load even faster.
• At the bottom of the skweezed page, you’ll find links back to the feed you were reading and a link back to your feed list.
• If you run across any pages that are not in your native tongue, Skweezer will translate to more than a dozen languages.

So if you’ve been wary of venturing beyond your Bloglines Mobile on your fancy new Blackberry (or Treo or other smartphone), free yourself from those inhibitions and click away!

- The Bloglines Team

We sincerely apologize for the disruption and we’re working to make things right. We know how important these personalization features are to Bloglines fans (we all love them, too), and we appreciate your understanding and patience.

- The Bloglines Team

On July 18th 2006, Bloglines was privately notified by SPI Dynamics of a security vulnerability involving the injection of javascript in feeds. Realizing the severity of the exploit, on the same day we pushed a fix out to close this loophole. We’d like to thank SPI Dynamics for both finding this issue and notifying us of the exploit in a reasonable manner allowing us to keep our users secure.

- The Bloglines Team

- The Bloglines Team

Pew’s recent report on bloggers found that “52% of bloggers say they blog mostly for themselves, not for an audience” and that “despite the public nature of creating a blog, most bloggers view it as a personal pursuit.”Maybe their content isn’t completely private, but some may not intend it for the masses. The standard we propose endeavors to enable bloggers and publishers to distinguish between making their content available for limited public consumption by friends, families, colleages or communities versus wanting it to be easily found by the public at large.

This issue bloggers and publishers are facing is similar to the issue robots.txt addressed. Sites that don’t want to be publicized or easily accessible to the masses use robots.txt to tell search engines not to crawl or index their pages without having to set up password authentication systems that would overly restrict their visitor community. By most accounts, the robots.txt standard has been largely successful in doing just that.

Our proposal for a Feed Access Control Standard is about creating a robots.txt-like standard for feeds. Bloggers and publishers who don’t want their feeds to be publicized will be able to tell search engines, aggregators and other feed crawlers to exclude their feed from listings, directories and search engine indexes.

We recognize that this proposed standard explicitly does not address republication. But just as robots.txt has done, it will act as a sign post to a search engine or an aggregator that a particular feed’s content (the content in the feed itself, not just on the page that is linked to from the feed) should not be indexed. Like a stop sign, the value is in making everyone aware of the rules of the road. As with any rule of the road, it relies on the community to adhere to it to prevent “accidents.”

Since we announced the proposed standard, we have been contacted by some really smart people at leading companies that are providing services in this space (Feedburner,Google, SixApart and Yahoo, to name just a few). We are really excited about working with them and other technology leaders, search engines, publishers and aggregators to develop a consensus that best addresses this need.

We’ll keep everyone updated on this page, but for now keep those cards and letters coming. Each one makes this a better process and a better proposal for our community.

- Robyn DeuPree, Bloglines Sr. Product Manager

- The Bloglines Team

Along these lines, we recently offered a new way to claim your own feeds and indicate whether you want your feed included or excluded from Blog & Feed search on Ask.com and Bloglines (for more information, read the blog post announcing our Publisher Tools). But this method only solves the issue at Bloglines and Ask.com, and it doesn’t address user-created (as opposed to publisher-created) feeds, like flickr feeds, which can’t be claimed. Clearly, there is a need for an industry-wide solution.

As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to ‘deny’ will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In Bloglines, we’ll use this to prevent the display of the feed information or posts in search results or any other public venue. If other readers and aggregators use the information in the same way, and publishers of feeds,including services that let users create feeds, implement this standard, we could make significant progress toward making feeds truly safe for non-public information. We think that’s a pretty cool idea.

For technical details on the RSS and ATOM extension, refer to this document:

http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0

If you’d like to participate in discussions about this proposed standard, join the rss-dev group and/orthe atom-syntax mailing list.

You may also ask your provider to contact us if they have any questions.

-The Bloglines Team

-The Bloglines Team

Note: In order to use the new hotkeys ‘o’/'O’, you may need to modify your browser’s popup blocker settings to allow the “bloglines.com”domain.

-The Bloglines Team

-The Bloglines Team

While viewing search results, just use the to view the entire article like this. Play the audio or video from inside the results:

Thanks to Martin Laine for writing the flash audio player. You can find it on his site.We also want to thank the smarty-pants whale, giggling tourists and YouTube.com for providing this week’s video entertainment.

- The Bloglines Team

Bloglines has always tried to ease the pain of moving your blog. If you set upa 301 redirect, Bloglines will automagically set that feed as a duplicate to the new feed after a week or two. Our customer support team has also responded to requests to mark feeds as duplicates. But we knew publishers needed a smoother process.

As of last night, we now offer you an American-styleself-serve-fix-it-right-now solution. We launched a new set of tools for publishers which allow you to claim your feeds and manage them within Bloglines. We’re offering several nifty tools but we’re especially excited about offering you a way to mark an old feed as a duplicate of a new feed. When we set a feed as a duplicate, all of the subscribers are brought over to the new feed so there’s no need to ask your Bloglines readers to re-subscribe.Follow the Account link (header, top right) to find Publisher Toolsand follow the instructions to claim your feed.

Trepidations about losing Bloglines subscribers when you move should be a thingof the past. You are now free to move about the blogosphere.

- The Bloglines Team

Bloglines wants you to know that our ears are wide open. Whether you use the Bloglines reader, search, publish a blog or all of the above, we want your freedback. Simply include the terms “freedbacking” and “bloglines” somewhere in your post and we’ll pick it up. For those who don’t have a blog or for those who have blogs without feeds, please submit your freedback via our contact form. We may not always reply or post comments but your freedback will be incorporated into our existing projects, ongoing roadmap and product vision. And if you are interested in participating as a beta reviewer, let us know.

We hope other product teams will follow suit and monitor the freedback posts directed toward them. The Bloglines team uses search subcriptions in Bloglines to monitor freedback but any product team can do the same. To subscribe to a search, perform a search, then click on either Bloglines or RSS on the right.

Bloglines will be at Gnomedex this week in Seattle. If you plan on attending, we’d love to hear your freedback in person. For those who don’t know, Gnomedex is a conference organized by Chris Pirillo. Although it’s small (a few hundred people), it packs a big punch because the attendees and presenters number among the most influencial and active participants in the Internet and Blogosphere evolution. We’re looking forward to our 30 minute session on Friday afternoon.

Happy Freedbacking,

- The Bloglines Team

Another area where people may see duplicates are search subscriptions. You aren’t imagining it in this case. What’s happening is that some feeds aggregate and repost content from other sources so you are seeing the post that came from the original source plus the reposts. You might also see duplicates because publishers offer feeds in multiple syndication formats such as Atom and RSS. Which leads us to our next topic.

As we continue to develop new features, small and large, we also make necessary improvements to existing systems. Expanding our support for the Atom 1.0 syndication standard is the latest of these. You may notice duplicate posts coming from atom feeds as we make the switch from the old to the new atom parser. But have no fear, these duplicates will fade away and soon be a distant memory.

- The Bloglines Team

Want to know more first? OK, ye of little curiosity and much patience, this blog’s for you. Behind that fancy search tab is our all-new “Blog & Feed Search.” We created it by building a search index populated exclusively with Bloglines’ human-selected subscriptions. We then applied Ask.com’s world-class search technology to the index and supplemented the Ask algorithm with Bloglines subscription data and citation information. The result is a blog search we feel is second-to-none. In fact, we’re so happy with the results, we’ve given everyone two ways to enjoy them: on www.Bloglines.com and www.Ask.com, with each site’s version sprinkled with a few specialized features. (Check out the blog post on the Ask.com blog or visit <a href=”http://blogsearch.ask.comblogsearch.ask.com for the specialized Ask.com features.)

So enough with the back story and on with the show and tell.

If you haven’t been bitten by the Bloglines bug yet, maybe you are asking “Why use Blog & Feed Search?” I am here to tell you, my friends, that your world is about to change. Bloglines Search will help you find blog posts, articles and commentary from the live web that matters to you and to just about anyone else including my mamma. And Bloglines delivers it to you in a single, easy to use, online application.

We live in a fast food, me first, don’t-give-me-my-grandfather’s-tired-old-news-source world. As CNET’s Elinor Mills said, “Comedian Stephen Colbert’s satirical routine mocking the administration at the White House Correspondent Association’s dinner received scant attention in the mainstream news, but it set the blogosphere on fire.” As soon as that news broke, we wanted to know more and we wanted it fast. Ask.com search technology indexes new content approaching the speed of light – OK, maybe not that fast but certainly minutes and sometimes within seconds, of it being published.

Speedy updates are just one of the many features offered by Blog & Feed Search on Bloglines:

• Search for Posts, Feeds or Citations (a.k.a. links).
• Limit your search to your Bloglines feeds, or exclude them.
• View additional results for matching feeds & news are offered in the right column.
• Give us a name and we’ll also present you with posts Authored by and About them.
• Preview 5 most recent posts for any feed by mousing over Preview Feed.
• Expand the summary to view the entire post inline using the + button.
• Subscribe to search queries in Bloglines or any other reader.
• Email the article, or Post it to your Bloglines Blog or Clippings folders.
• Sort your results by Relevance, Date or Popularity.
• Filter results by time or popularity on Bloglines.
• Exclude news feeds (or search only news).
• Find matching results in up 20 languages.
• Mobile-friendly search from your pda at http://bloglines.com/mobile

Pretty cool, huh? Wait till you try it. Really. Go try it. Pig out! And then come back for more because the Bloglines team has plenty more candy up our sleeves to help you find, subscribe and share the content that matters to you. So have a taste of this and stay tuned.

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions so keep ‘em coming and we’ll respond as soon as we can, but we probably won’t respond as blazing fast as our search engine.

Cheers,
Robyn DeuPree
Bloglines Product Manager

P.S. There are two little Easter egg features that I’m sure one of you Bloglines users will find and appreciate. Have fun searching for it!

Subscribe to YouTube’s RSS feeds and you are sure to get your recommended daily dose of laughter. We enjoy the Today’s Most Viewed Videos feed.

Publishers, wondering how to get your content to appear within Bloglines? We now display RSS enclosures with type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”. For more information regarding enclosures please see the RSS Specification.

-Team Bloglines

Bloglines readers, you too will benefit. Blog posts from publishers who choose to ping us will show up within minutes, sometimes seconds, of being posted.

- Your Bloglines Team

- The Bloglines Team

• Business 2.0′s The Next Net 25
• Chicago Tribune’s 50 best Web sites: SERVICES
• Designtechnica’s The Best of Web 2.0 review

- Robyn DeuPree, Sr. Product Manager

Feed Management

The features previously separated in Edit and Reorder/Sort modes are now consolidated into a single Edit mode found at the top of My Feeds and Clippings.

1. Create a new Folder by clicking on the New Folder icon.
2. Rename inline. Click once to select the item and click a second time to edit the name.
3. Double click on any item to edit details for feeds, folders and clippings.
4. Unsubscribe or delete a folder by dragging it to the trash can. (Tip: To cancel a drag, tap the Esc key.)
5. To manually sort, simply drag and drop into place; use the arrow keys or mouse wheel to scroll.
6. To sort automatically, make your selection and then choose from the dropdown menu. You can sort alphabetically, reverse alpha, by oldest or newest first, or by the number of unread items.
7. If you use Bloglines Mobile, you may want to exclude feeds from your mobile view to avoid wasting valuable minutes downloading feeds you don’t need.
8. Do you have a handful of feeds that you read more often than others? Turn off the Notifier for the other feeds so that little ‘ding-dong’ only interrupts you when it’s important.
9. Maybe you’re a tattoo artist and don’t want to share your Blogroll for fear your clients will find out you read knitting blogs. Have no fear, you can keep it secret. Just mark them as private and those feeds won’t be listed.
10. We’ve made it easier to choose multiple items. You can now use shift-click to select ranges or ctrl-click (command-click on Mac) for separate items.

We also want to give a shout out to some folks who have posted wise words about how to handle information overload:

• Nev n Dave
• D. Keith Robinson
• Stephen M. Nipper

Our mission at Bloglines is to make it easy to find and read the information most important to you. Today’s feature release is only the beginning of a long queue of improvements we plan to introduce over the coming months.

This has been a public service announcement from the Bloglines team.

We’re proud to say that Bloglines has experienced tremendous growth, more than tripling subscribers, feeds and articles in less than a year. On January 5th we topped 1 billion articles and we’re currently pulling in new articles at a rate of 3-4 million per day.  For those number naysayers out there, keep in mind that we only keep articles from feeds that users have subscribed to (which also keeps our splog count lean).  For these reasons, we consider ours to be the highest quality blogosphere index that exists.

With the system and hardware upgrades now in place, Bloglines users are experiencing across-the-board performance improvements, including increased freshness and faster page loads.  For example, check out the cliff on this graph, courtesy of GrabPERF, showing how the datacenter move helped us drop our page response time from 0.7 to 0.2 seconds.

With the move well behind us, we’ve got a lot more time to spend improving Bloglines.  We’ve been listening to what our users want to see and we’re already working on killer stuff (just wait and see).

- The Bloglines team

UPDATE: We need to take the system down for about 10 minutes,starting at 7:15pm Pacific Standard Time (3:15am UTC).

UPDATE 2: We apologize for the extra, unplanned plumber this evening. That was the result ofa mistake with the web server configuration files. The plumber apologizes for his error, and we’veplaced him in a locked box with the hope that this does not happen again.

There is also a known issue with some subscriptions showing incorrect unread counts. However, your unread items have not been lost. Clicking on the subscription will display all the unread articles. We are working to fix this.

We’ll follow up with a more detailed post when we’re more settled in. Thanks again for your patience support during this outage.

- The Bloglines Team

• 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items.
• 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account.
• 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account.

We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

- The Bloglines Team

All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).

So hang tight because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you posted.

- The Bloglines Team

Mobile
Do you often find yourself reading Bloglines on your mobile phone with too many feeds and too little time? Well, we’ve got great news. No, we’re not selling you gecko lizard insurance. But we have made it easy for you to create an abbreviated mobile version of your feed list so you don’t have to scroll past dozens of feeds to get to those you have time to read.

To create your mobile feed list, click the Edit link while in the web version, check which subscriptions you want or don’t want displayed in your mobile view and then select your option in the dropdown menu. You can also change this setting by clicking on the Edit Subscription link while viewing any of your feeds.

Another useful option for dealing with a lot of subscriptions is to have Bloglines only display subscriptions that have unread articles. Click on your Account link and look under Feed Options for the setting to show only updated feeds. This applies to both web and mobile versions. In case you’ve never seen Bloglines mobile, here’s a shot of what it looks like on Robyn’s new phone:

Job Search
Are you spending too much time searching for a job and not enough time reading your Bloglines? Add a personalized job search feed from Simply Hired. Click the Add link at the top of your feed list and then select the Jobs link. If you aren’t job hunting, subscribe to www.simplyfired.com for some great stories like the guy who got fired for eating pizza out of the break room fridge. As the slogan says “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.”

- The Bloglines Team

Hotkeys
If you prefer using your keyboard to mousing around, you’ll be happy to know we’ve added these shortcut keys. You will find this legend at the bottom of each feed display page:

On a personal note, I must say these hotkeys rock! If you are like me and seem to get a gazillion articles in your Bloglines every day, these hotkeys are for you. I used to go through a finger stretching, huff & puff ritual before I reached for my mouse and dove in to Bloglines. No more, thanks to Bloglines’ hotkeys. My absolute favorite is ‘j’ which allows me to jump from article to article instead of scrolling. I can now read my Bloglines in half the time, no joke!

But wait! There’s more…

Unread vs. Keep As New
There’s a difference between “Unread” articles and those marked “Keep as New” (subtle, but distinct), so you will now see two numbers next to your subscribed feeds in parentheses. The number to the left of the colon represents the articles you have not read/seen before, and the number on the right represents the articles you have manually kept new.

Mobile
For those who enjoy using Bloglines on the run, we’ve added a couple of features from Bloglines to our Mobile edition.

• First, you can now access enclosure links in blog articles, allowing you to view images or listen to your favorite podcasts from your mobile device.
• Second, you can now use the “Keep as New” option for articles you have previously read, allowing you to scroll through as many articles as you want and come back to them later.

And finally, the ginsu knives of Bloglines …

Universal Inbox
Continuing the rollout of “unique-to-me” features like weather and package tracking, we’ve partnered with Astrology.com to deliver daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, and Lottery.com to bring you lottery winning numbers and jackpot values for any state in the USA.

Please let us know what you think about our new features. No need to send email, just post to your blog and our Bloglines saved searches will pick up your feedback.

Robyn DeuPree
Product Manager, Bloglines

-Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines team

Update: We had to replace some failed hardware during the maintenance.You may notice that some unread counts are off. They will correct themselves after you read your subscriptions. We sincerely apologize for this.

And in our team’s never-ending quest to justify glamorous foreign offices, we’re introducing new translations for two of our favorite places: The Netherlands and Italy. We’ll move there for work! Yeah, that’s the ticket. After all, Antonio already invited us: http://blog.ask.com/2005/07/a_postcard_from.html — that’s as good as HQ approval, right?

Bloglines Helps Bridge The Vastness Of Space

News Feed and Blog Reading In The Warrior Tongue

Oakland, CA, Earth — Stardate: 2005.4.1 — Bloglines,the world’s most popular free online service for searching, subscribing,publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content, today opened thedoors of its service to audiences beyond our solar system with a newtranslation in Klingon, the galaxy’s fastest-spreading invented language.

“The custom of sharing grand stories of conquest and battlehas a long standing history among the Klingon people,” said Mark Fletcher,founder of Bloglines. “Blogging is simply an easy way to continue thetradition while stuck in deep space, away from your family. We feel thatpresenting Bloglines in the Warrior Tongue was long overdue.”

Klingon marks the eighth language translation for Bloglines,joining Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Tonavigate Bloglines in Klingon, simply select the language from the menu on theleft hand side of the Bloglines home page. To find out more about the Klingonlanguage, visit http://www.kli.org/ or checkwith your local Klingon embassy. Qapla’!

loghDaq ghotpu’ rar Bloglines

DaH QonoS ladlaH tlhIngan Hol jatlhlaHbogh ghotpu”e’

Oakland, CA, tera’ — HovpoH: 2005.4.1 — Bloglines QaQ law’Hoch Qaq puS. DaHjaj tlhIngan HolvaD mughta’ QonoSmey bobejmoHlaHboghBloglines’e’. nom tlhIngan Hol jatlhchoH ghot law’.

<<tlhIngan nughvaD qun ghaj may’ bom tIgh>> jatlh BloglineschenmoHta’bogh Mark Fletcher. <<HopvIS qorDu’lIj, tIghvetlh taHmoHmeHtlhIngan ngeD neH. tlhIngan Bloglines mughmeH QaQ DaH,>>

BloglinesvaD Hol chorghDIch ‘oH tlhIngan Hol’e’. Chinese, English, French,German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish je muvta’. tlhIngan Hol leghlu’meHHIDjolevDaq tlhIngan Hol yIwIv! tlhIngan Hol Daghoj DaneHchughhttp://www.kli.org/ yIlaD qoj tlhInganrIvSo’ yISuch. Qapla’!

Help us realize our vision of being the Internet home page for the 21st Century!

Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines, and we’re excited about becoming thenewest member of their portfolio of web services. We view this as a hugestep forward for Bloglines, and a chance to achieve our mission of makingRSS news reading and blogging a part of everyone’s internet experience.You can learn more about the transaction by reading our press release or reviewingour Frequently Asked Questions.

We want to assure you that the Bloglines service will continue to grow andthrive. Like other companies in the Ask Jeeves portfolio, we will operateas a standalone, separate service — the Bloglines name will remain, aswill our URL, www.bloglines.com. Wewill support our current features and services, so please continue to login to Bloglines to search, subscribe, publish and share RSS news feeds andblogs. All users will continue to be governed by the Terms of Service you agreed to when you registeredfor Bloglines.

We have a great roadmap on how to integrate some of the many innovativetechnologies of Ask Jeeves, including its Teoma algorithmic searchtechnology. As always, we will share news of ourprogress on our blog, Bloglines News. And we encourage you to participate in the conversation. Ourusers have been amazing help in guiding the evolution of Bloglines, and wehope you will continue to give us input so we can remain the gold standardin blogging, search, and news aggregation.

We understand you may have questions about the acquisition and we’ll try toanswer them all as best we can. Please continue to contact our customer service with your questions and comments.

Thanks for your loyalty, patience, encouragement and feedback throughoutthis exciting process.

All the best,

Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines Team

The tremendous growth we’ve experienced in RSS aggregation is why we’regoing to continue to do everything we can to bring blog and news readingto all Internet users. This month we’re introducing our newest feature,the Bloglines Newsletter, to help inform you and provide a glimpse into the different ways people are using the service.

The first issue explains keyword search feeds and profiles how a cancerresearcher uses Bloglines to stay up-to-date with scientific publishing.

You can choose to receive the newsletter via email or simply stay subscribed to Bloglines News,and we’ll let you know when each issue is posted.

So take a look at the inaugural issue of theBloglines Newsletterand let us know what you think. We’d love to hear abouthow you use Bloglines!

We have also reached the milestone of 200 million articles indexed. It tookus a year to reach 100 million, and less than 4 months for our blog and newsfeed content index to double. That’s amazing in any language.

With the 1.0 release today, we think it is really going to take off, andthat’s why we’re announcing the Bloglines Firefox Center today.

Over the past few months, we’ve watched users steadily switch away fromNetscape and Internet Explorer to Firefox. Back in July, while Firefox wasstill in beta, it had grown to over 5% of our traffic. Today, Firefoxrepresents 20% of requests to Bloglines.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Firefox is its ease of extensibility.We regularly hear from developers writing programs on top of the BloglinesWeb Services and Notifier APIs, but the Firefox extensions are some of thebest and should really help regular consumers use RSS. To learn more,visit our Firefox Center and grab a copy of the browser and all thelatest extensions.

• “Blog this Link” and “Blog this Text” options in context menu,allowing easy posting to your Bloglines Clip Blog
• Automatic updating enabled
• Compatible with latest Firefox nightly builds (0.11 or 1.0RC1)
• Updated icon and text

In addition to the Mozilla extension, a new Firefox extension calledLiveLines has been developed by Bloglines user Gomyoung Kim.The notifiers page has a list of allthe Bloglines notifiers and browser extensions available.

There has been a lot of activity involving the BloglinesWeb Services, and we have updated the listof programs that use them. Several additional aggregators haveannounced support for Bloglines. There’s a new Bloglines IM notifier, severalprograms dedicated to Bloglines and podcasting, and a script to download your Bloglines feeds to your iPod.

Finally, we have updated the Bloglines Web Services Sync API. The getitems method now supports bulk fetching ofarticles from all the subscriptions within a folder.

In addition, we also launched a new feature, Show Only Updated Feeds. You can toggle this setting in the Feed Options page of your account. When active, only subscriptions that haveunread articles will be displayed in your My Feeds page. It’s a greatway to simplify the My Feeds display.

We also announced that several leadingdesktop aggregators, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and BlogBot, will be supportingthe new functions, which will allow their users to synchronize theirdesktop accounts with Bloglines.

We look forward to the many exciting applications that will be built,and we will continue to expand the functionality of the BloglinesWeb Services.

Keep New

When reading your feeds, at the bottom of each entry is a checkbox labeledKeep New. Check it and that entry is marked unread, and will stay that wayuntil you uncheck the box. This is useful for entries that you decide youdon’t have time to read right now, but that you don’t want to save in yourClippings folder. You can also use the mark all new link thatappears at the top of each feed in the right pane when reading subscriptionsto reset all the currently displayed items to unread.

Related Feeds

Throughout the Bloglines site, there is now a related feeds link foreach feed. We look at all the Bloglines subscribers for a given feed, andcalculate what other feeds may be related to that feed. This is another method for finding interesting feeds. It complements the Bloglines Recommendations which differ inthat those are personalized for each user.

Log In Change

Finally, on a technical note, we changed how user authentication isdone on the site. All this means to you, our users, is that youmay have had to to log in again after the site upgrade, even if you werelogged into the site before.

• You can now move a subscription to a different folder from within the’Edit Subscription’ dialog
• Clip Blogs now have a calendar, so that older entries can be viewed by date
• The ‘tips’ have been redone, and you can now easily cycle through various Bloglines features in the right pane of the My Feeds display
• The Subscribe page has been enhanced with shortcutsthat make it easy to subscribe to Live Journals, Xanga blogs, Google Groups, and Yahoo Groups. This page is also accessible through the Addlink in the left pane of the My Feeds page.

We’re also pleased to announce the release of the Bloglines InternetExplorer extension. The extension was developed by Bloglines userDan Grigsby. For moreinformation about all of the Bloglines notifiers and browserextensions, please see the Bloglines Notifierspage.

• The font size preference was added back, and various font sizes havebeen decreased.
• We lightened some of the colors to make articles easier to read.
• We have added back the OPML Import function, theability to manually reorder subscriptions, the /public display,and the Tell A Friend feature.
• Before clicking the ‘Clip/Blog This’ link to create a clipping orblog post, highlight the text you’d like to reference, and the text willautomatically be copied into the Clip dialog.

Please continue to send us your feedback and suggestions.

Today we’re unwrapping some great surprises for all of you. You’veprobably noticed our new look, which has been designed to make Bloglineseasier to use and enjoy. Hope you like it!

With the new look, we’ve added several new features, based on yourfeedback. You can now specify how your subscriptions and folders areto be sorted, and new subscriptions will be sorted automatically. Wehave added a user directory, to make it easier to see what otherBloglines users are reading. And we’re really excited to introduce our biggest new feature:

Bloglines Clip Blogs
- The easiest way to create a blog
- Fully integrated with all your Bloglines news feeds
- One-click blogging from any Web page
- Subscribe to friends’ Clip Blogs and get notified of updates
- Simply click on the ‘My Blog’ tab to set up your Bloglines Clip Blog
- Best of all, your Clip Blog is completely free — just like the rest of Bloglines!

In addition, Saved Items have been renamed to Clippings, and you can easily move private, clipped items to your public blog and back again.

And oh how we’ve grown: Today Bloglines searches and indexes more than 80million web articles and receives more than 5 million hits a day.

As always, we look forward to your feedback about our new changes, and suggestions for how we can continue to improve the service. If you have any suggestions or questions, please contact us.

Thanks for making our first year a great success!

Update: We’ve already received some great feedback. One thing we’dlike to mention is that we will be adding back the font size preference.Until then, both IE and Mozilla provide the ability to change the fontsize of a given page. Look in the View menu of your browser to set this.

Update 2: We have added back the font size preference setting, andrestored existing users’ font preferences. To change your font size preference, visit your Account page, and look for the ‘Font Size’ selector. We are also continuing to tweak the new sitebased on the great feedback we’ve received so far.

In addition, the new version of Firefox broke many of the extensions built for it, includingthe Bloglines Toolkit. Chad has releaseda new version of the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit that iscompatible with the new version of Firefox, as well being compatible with older versions of Firefox and Mozilla.

In addition, you can now use Bloglines or another reader to subscribe to RSS feeds of these pages. Each page has a ‘Subscribe’ button to subscribeusing Bloglines, and the individual pages are:

• The Overall Most Popular Links
• The Top Gaining Links
• The Top Declining Links

If you wish to access the individual RSS feeds in another aggregator, they are at:

• http://www.bloglines.com/rss/toplinks – for the 25 most popular links
• http://www.bloglines.com/rss/toplinks_inc – for the top 25 gaining links
• http://www.bloglines.com/rss/toplinks_dec – for the top 25 declining links

To download, please visit our notifierdownloads page.

• Works with proxies
• It’s easier to specify the time between updates, and longer intervalsare available
• Clicking on the Bloglines icon now always brings up a browser window;previously it would only do that if you had new items to read
• A new browser window is used instead of reusing an existing window
• Clicking on the icon to bring up your Bloglines account also resetsthe unread count in the notifier to 0; if you have a long update intervalthis will prevent false unread readings
• Several bug fixes

To download, please visit our notifierdownloads page.

The Konfabulator Mac OS X Notifier was written by Bloglines user Fernando J. Pereda.

To download the Konfabulator Bloglines Notifier, see the kBloglines gallery page.

Another Bloglines user, KonstantinGrusha, has written a notifier for the KDE Desktop Environmentunder Unix.

To download the KDE/Unix Bloglines Notifier, see theKDE Notifier Sourceforce Page.

To downloadone of the other Bloglines notifiers, please visit our notifier downloads page.

• Complete entries are displayed, as has been the behavior up to now.
• Summaries are displayed instead of complete entries, if the blog has them.
• Titles are displayed, with the ability to expand individual titles toshow the complete entry.

There is a new overall display preference settable from your profile, which you can override on a per-subscription basis. To do so, click the Edit link for thesubscription.

In other news, we have also added a link from our Sightings to a great new Bloglinestutorial. Check it out.

Citations is a way to search the Bloglines links database. Enter a partialURL, and it will find all matches for that URL from all the blogs thatwe index.

Email subscriptions make it easy to receive yourmailing list messages and other email within your Bloglines account. Youcan create an unlimited number of special @bloglines.com emailaddresses. Email sent to those addresses show up in your Bloglinesaccount, as if they were blog entries.

There’s no longer any need to wade through the spam in your inbox to read your mailing list messages.When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You neverhave to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for amailing list you’re on.

We have also tweaked the search results pages to make themeasier to read.

Update: Based on user feedback, we have renamed this toTell a Friend, which is moredescriptive of the feature.

Interested in appearing in the user directory? Make sure you have your profile configured to allow others to view your subscriptions. Go to yourBloglines Profilepage, select a User Name, and make sure the Share Subscriptionsoption is set to Yes.

You can now enter comments for each of your subscriptions and saveditems. Have problems remembering why you saved a particular item? Youcan enter a reminder as a comment. A future feature will allow otherpeople to view your public comments about blogs.

Finally, we have added an option to search feeds, which lets youspecify that the full text of a matching item be included in yoursubscription instead of the excerpt that is provided now.

We also made a change to the log out screen. We added the ability tolog back in from the log out screen.

Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing liststhat don’t provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary emailaddresses.

• Sub Folders Within Saved Items – You can now organize saved items withinsub-folders. The Manage pagenow has two views, a Manage Subscriptions view, and a Manage Saved Itemsview. You can also now include your links in a blogroll.
• Reuse New Window – From the profilepage, you can specify Reuse New Window as a link prefernce.The first time you click on a link, it will load in anew window. Subsequently, other links will be loaded in that same window.
• Default Sort Preference – From the profilepage you can now specify a default sort preference for blog items. Also,if you change the sorting for a given subscription, that preference is now remembered.
• User Language – From the profilepage you can now specify a default language. If a blog item is in a different language than your specified default language, a translatelink will be displayed, pointing to the Googletranslation of that page.

We have also added a couple of great Bloglines mentions to our
Sightings page, including mentions
at two recent conferences. Thanks to everyone who continues to spread the
word about Bloglines!

We have also added the ability to mark subscriptions and folders so thatthey will be ignored by the BloglinesNotifier when they have new items. If you want to be notifiedwhen only some of your subscriptions have been updated, this is thefeature for you. Go to the Manage Subscriptionspage to set this up.

Finally, we have added a new option to the Profilepage. Default Collapsed means that when you click on a subscriptionor a folder, the items are not expanded in the right-pane of the My Blogspage, and they are not marked as read. This makes it easy to selectivelyread subscriptions without having to worry about them all being markedas read.

Also, you can now specify that some of your folders or subscriptionsare private, even if your profile is set to allow sharing. A privatefolder or subscription will not show up in your blogroll, or whensomeone is viewing your subscriptions using the /public URL.

For more information on these features, please see ourSharing Your Subscriptions help page.

In other news, today Bloglines passed 4 Million blog entries in our database.We recently completed some upgrades to our service that will ensure that we will continue to be able to support our growth. Please spread the word aboutBloglines!

We’ve also added several great entries to the Sightings Page.

We have also fixed a couple of bugs, including one involving the import ofcertain OPML files.

Bug fixes and internal database changes aren’t as much fun as adding newfeatures, but they are just as important. Don’t worry, we’ve got somegreat new features lined up for launch next week.

Last night we passed 2 million items in the database. As we continueto roll out new features and gain new users, we continue to monitor web site performance. While performance has been pretty good, yesterday we made a couple of internal changes as part of our goalto ensure that the Bloglines web site will continue to be very responsive.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME

where USERNAME is the name you selected in your profile. They can viewyour subscriptions, but they cannot edit or delete them.

We have made the registration process easier. The confirmation email nowincludes a link to a web page, which validates the account. There isstill the option of replying to the email to validate their account.

We have added the shortcut URL http://my.bloglines.com,which takes you directly to your My Bloglines page.

Finally, we added a tooltip for the title of each item. Now if you move yourcursor over an item’s title, it will display the name of the site.

We have added an RSS feed to track Bloglines News. Click here to subscribe.

It was too difficult to unsubscribe from blogs. Now, when viewing blogs, there’s now an ‘Unsubscribe’ link included with the blog header, forone-click unsubscribing.

In other news, we have fixed an issue with search that was causing it to crash or return no results for some users.

We have added a new feature that allows you to display the items forall the blogs in a given folder that are more recent than a specifiedtime. Click on a folder that does not have any new items in it (orclick on the ‘Subscriptions’ link at the top of the page). The dialogbox displayed on the right indicating that there are no new items now has anoption to display recent items.

The Bloglines Update for 8/12/03

In this issue:

o We’ve Been Busy
o Have a Blog? Increase Your Readership
o Lockergnome!
o Help Us Improve Bloglines!

– Welcome! –

Welcome to the latest update report for Bloglines. We periodically send out these messages to update you, our users on new features and services. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, edit your Bloglines profile by going to http://www.bloglines.com/profile and change the ‘Receive Newsletter’ option to ‘No’.

– We’ve Been Busy –

Since our last Bloglines update message, we’ve added many newfeatures and options. Most were suggested by our users. Have anidea on we can improve Bloglines? Tell us! See the end of thismessage for more information.

Here is a list of just some of the features we’ve added in the past couple of weeks:

• Search
  You can now search over 750,000 blog entries from over 9,000 blogs. Too many? You can also limit searches to blogs you subscribe to. See http://www.bloglines.com/search
• Improved Manage Subscriptions Screen
  Managing subscriptions in Bloglines was too difficult. So we re-worked the manage screen to make it easier to reorder subscriptions and add folders. See http://www.bloglines.com/manage
• Combined Views
  Don’t like clicking on individual subscriptions to view new entries? Group several subscriptions in a folder. Then, you can click on the folder and see all the new entries for the entire folder. You can also click on the ‘Subscriptions’ link at the top of the My Blogs page and see all the new items for all of your subscriptions. To add folders and move subscriptions, see http://www.bloglines.com/manage
• Time Zones
  Not everyone lives on the west coast. You can now configure Bloglines to display times in your time zone. See http://www.bloglines.com/profile for more information
• Easy Subscribe Bookmarklet
  It’s easier than ever to subscribe to blogs with Bloglines. We have a subscription bookmarklet that makes subscribing to a blog as easy as a single click. See http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub

– Have a Blog? Increase Your Readership –

We recently added several new Bloglines subscription buttons.It is easy to include a subscription link to Bloglines on your blog. Your readers will easily be able to stay current with your blog without having to remember to visit it. The Bloglines crawler includes the number of subscribers to your blog with each feed request, so you will always know how many Bloglines subscribers you have. See http://www.bloglines.com/about/subscribe forstep-by-step instructions.

– Lockergnome –

Bloglines was recently featured as a Lockergnome Gnome Favorite.Thanks guys! If you haven’t noticed, Lockergnome has a greatRSS resource site, and you can subscribe to it using Bloglines.See http://rss.lockergnome.com and to subscribe, seehttp://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://rss.lockergnome.com

– Help us Improve Bloglines! –

We are continuing to upgrade and improve the Bloglines system. Our best features have been from suggestions by our users. Know how we can improve Bloglines? Tell us about it! Send us a message byclicking on http://www.bloglines.com/contact

Thanks again for using Bloglines and tell a friend about us!

The Bloglines Team

Internally, we moved the database to a larger machine, without suffering any downtime.

We’ve got some big stuff planned for later this week.

Whose idea was it to run RSS news aggregators on the client?There must have been a good reason, but whenever we think back to recall it, a giant laughing face of Dave Winer balloons up and then it goes black. Now here comes Mark “ONElist” Fletcher’s BLOGLINES, challenging the received wisdom by being quite good.

Thanks guys! You rock.