Slashdot Mirror

First I will add a plug for https://www.bloglines.com/ â" RSS feeds where ever I can log in, via HTTPS. Great for those feeds I read whenever & everywhere; and for those I only check when waiting to board the airplane. In my bloglines collection I have around 400 feeds, which will grow after looking through these threads. :) Some selections that hopefully no one else has mentioned:

Amusement:
http://failblog.wordpress.com/feed/
All about the Fail

http://lolbots.com/?feed=rss2
Robots making the LOLz, though not updated often.

http://lolgeeks.com/?feed=rss2
Geeks making the LOLz, though not updated often.

The latest limerick database entries - http://peeron.com/tickers/limerickdb.xml

The Triumph of Bullshit - http://bullshit.tumblr.com/rss

Diesel Sweeties by R Stevens - http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ds-unifeed.xml

PHD Comics - http://www.phdcomics.com/gradfeed.php
Ever spent time in academia? You will relate to this web comic.

Unshelved - http://www.unshelved.com/rss.aspx
A web comic about a library. Ssssshhhuusshh!

Indexed - http://indexed.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Take two (or more) topics and compare them using graphs & charts â" full of insight & lolz.

Computerworld Shark Tank News - http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/Shark/Tank
Many stories, full of humor and face palm

Overheard in the Office - http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/atom.xml
Instead of what was overheard in New York, now worldwide and from your office.

Common geek topics (those blogs that seem to hit all the topics days or weeks before you see them on Slashdot):
Didnt You Hear... http://www.didntyouhear.com/feed/

The Daily WTF - http://thedailywtf.com/rss.aspx

Global Nerdy - http://globalnerdy.com/feed/

Shopping:
http://content.dealnews.com/dealnews/rss/todays-edition.xml
Many of those geek toys you need

Newegg.com daily deals: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=DailyDeals&nm_mc=OTC-RSS
Need I say more?

Slickdeals: http://www.slickdeals.net/rss.php
Need I say more?

Woot! http://www.woot.com/blog/rss.aspx

Dumb political stuff:
Homeland Stupidity: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HomelandStupidity
Government gaffes, bureaucratic blunders and incumbent incompetence

Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/backend/GrokLaw.rdf

Declan McCullagh's Politech http://www.politechbot.com/info/rss/politech.xml
Also not updated often, but on target when it is.

Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/cryptome.xml
You can get lost here for hours

Music:
House of Blues: http://hob.com/venues/clubvenues/lasvegas/
The RSS feed for the local House of B

http://www.virdeal.com.com/ http://www.allgamegold.com/ http://runescapeblogmaster.blogspot.com/ http://funingame-runescape.blogspot.com/ http://runescape-video-top10.blogspot.com/ http://runescapevideo.wordpress.com/ http://buyrunescapegold.wordpress.com/ http://virdeal-runescape-99.spaces.live.com/default.aspx http://www.bloglines.com/blog/virdeal-runescape http://runescapediscussion.blogspot.com/ http://runescapegold4realmoney.wordpress.com/ http://www.allgamegold.com/index.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape-gold.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape-guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape_skill_guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape_city_guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape_guild_guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/free_runescape_quest_guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/p2p_runescape_quest_guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape_mini_game_guides.html http://www.allgamegold.com/runescape_miscellaneous_guides.html

My list is pretty short, thanks to RSS. Google Reader filled up with all my 216 feeds, including Slashdot. (I don't read all 216.) Bloglines is also pretty good. Google News with saved searches for all my favorite topics. Not Easy for semi-random news. This sometimes helps me catch news I'd otherwise miss. Reddit for social news with much higher SNR and nicer design than Digg. For entertainment: QDB.us / random for IRC quotes. lingua.phobo.us (plug for a friend's 'zine :) Dear Abby for the occasional fucked up story. And a bunch of comics: Achewood, xkcd, Dilbert...

"Apache Axis2 is the first piece of middleware that has been largely created in Sri Lanka. This is not outsourcing- this is rock solid innovation all the way from the other side of the world. Apache Axis2 is not a brainded implementation of some JCP specs- in fact, we rejected the JCP specs and created our own way of doing things: not because of arrogance, but because those JCP specs don't quite cut it technically. It is innovation in its rawest form." Source: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/sanjiva?id=128

What I don't get about RSS is that it doesn't seem to be any better than, say, just setting up the sites I want to get news from on a bookmark folder in Firefox and middle clicking to open them all in new tabs.

I did that too, about 4 years ago. Then it grew to opening up 30 tabs, and having to a) recall what the previous web-page state was and b) identify if anything changed in a mix of differing, sometimes slow-to-load layouts. It was in competition with my slashboxes, which were quite novel and useful at the time. It was great, but then I discovered RSS.

My current (bloglines) subscription list is 327 feeds. They range far and wide: tech commentary, comics, raw news, politics, beer/homebrewing, trashy entertinment, meta, gadget-pr0n, Vermont bloggers (both tech and not), new-music blogs... Not all of them change daily, but many do, so I usually spend about 1..2 hours a day reading stuff. For instance, while the BBC news feeds are pretty much constantly updating, the Netflix new-releases feed will dump about 100 new items every couple of weeks; I can scan through, add the few I want and be on my way.

RSS is better because it's a change delivery mechanism, rather than a static content delivery mechanism (HTML). With an aggregator, it is far more efficient than doing change detection manually if the goal is to stay "current" with published content. Note that it has little to do with mobile devices, and many feeds are full-content (not just headline) feeds.

Sites like that from TFA stopped being interesting a long time ago; the thing we need now is editors. Digg, /., Boing Boing, &c. work because they are actively filtered. They may have different strategies for editorial prioritization of stories. Planet aggregators (Planet GNOME, Planet Apache, ...) are still interesting as well because they're naturally filtered to a single topic. Simple feeds (of feeds)^N aren't interesting.

I use http://www.bloglines.com/, and have been for a while now. I pull in stuff from all sorts of differnt sources, into one page. Yep, same thing that you can do with Firefox.

But - I can access Bloglines anywhere, on any machine, and I have access to my already customized list of news feeds and the stuff that I've marked for further reading later, etc. For some reason I keep finding myself needing the ability to access my stuff from multiple machines, so it works great for me. Especially nice since my Mac isn't very portable at the moment, and when my co-host and I set down at the local coffee shop (WiFi access and long island iced teas :-) and start going through news to see what's going to be on the show this week, we can both pull up our list of stuff that we've marked in Bloglines, and discuss it. Very nice.

How many people actually need that sort of functionality? Eh. Not very many, really, since most people only have one machine to deal with (not talking about the /. crowd, people in general :-) where they would read thier RSS feeds anyway. So you're partially right - it's a bit of a business fad. It's got it's uses, but as a couple of sites that do it get popular, there's gonna end up being a whole bunch of sites, then the nitch market gets crowded, and 2/3rds of them just die. The rest will continue to exist for people like me who find a good use for it :-)

(And, yeah, there's a bunch of other ways I could do it, including setting up setup for pulling all the RSS feeds down on my own server, and reading that. I might do that some day, when I have enough spare time. Bleh - got a lack of that.)

Oh heck, and since I'm here and mentioned the show, here's a link - http://www.worldofgamerzone.com/. Only the first three episodes are up at the moment, which puts me 5 episodes behind the broadcasts. Need to find more hours in the day... :-)

Given Sun's past criticism, I think it's fair to ask whether they have committed to using the GPL for future JRuby releases.

Of course they will, they can't change the licence to a less restrictive one. Also you could just have read .

This is offtopic grousing, but I submitted a Slashdot story that was rejected that I think is pretty important, namely that it is now official that Sun hires two of the main open source JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work fulltime on Ruby for the JVM, and generally improve tools support for dynamic languages.

This might get a lot of people worried ("Get your stinking Java out of my Ruby!" "Get your stinking Ruby out of my Java!", but I think this will benefit both languages, and especially the JVM as a platform.

It turns out that Bloglines was notified in advance by SPI Dynamics about the problem, and took steps to fix the problem the same day. Nicely done by both parties!

I compiled some quick facts which compare those three supercomputers and added pointers to other resources for your convenience:
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ITnomad?id=126

Cheers, Alex.

The list:

* Flickr * Vimeo * Del.icio.us * Digg * Bloglines * Netvibes * Writeboard * Google Maps * Google Local * Meebo
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

frankly speaking, it is excellent. try to beat that.
1. create bloglines account, subscribe to couple of feeds.
2. swithch to mobile version
http://bloglines.com/mobile
3. read all your news in a friendly format (I mostly use it behind my PC as it is just so simple)
http://bloglines.com/myblogs_subs

frankly speaking, it is excellent. try to beat that.
1. create bloglines account, subscribe to couple of feeds.
2. swithch to mobile version
http://bloglines.com/mobile
3. read all your news in a friendly format (I mostly use it behind my PC as it is just so simple)
http://bloglines.com/myblogs_subs

I personally use Bloglines - a web based news reader. This lets me check and read my subscriptions from home and work without having to read posts twice. Google Reader is a similar application but has tagging and merges all your feeds into one.

but how we do trust this software ? For that we should go for another third party tool ? huh Arun A.S http://www.arunspillai.blogspot.com/ http://www.bloglines.com/blog/arunsasikumar

Bloglines offers a Subscribe to Bloglines bookmarklet, so I can easily subscribe to any website I visit.

Another RSS service is SuprGlu which will take all your feeds and put them on a web page for you.

IMHO, the in-browser (Safari, Firefox) RSS features kind of suck, and are fairly limited in their usefulness.

To really appreciate the technology, you need to be using a good aggregator. For desktop applications, Thunderbird is actually pretty decent (I like that it loads the web pages themselves in the preview pane). Or since you're using a Mac, you might want to try NetNewsWire (I'm not a Mac user so can't say anything about it personally, but I've heard good reviews on that one). Alternative, there are a number of free web-based aggregators out there - Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader, probably others I can't think of offhand. All have their own strengths and weaknesses.

For sites like the BBC, I find it's still easier to just go to the site when I want to check the latest news - the problem with it is that it generates so many headlines that your reader quickly gets flooded, and it's unlikely you're interested in all of them anyway.

Where it really shines though is for the sites that don't generate hundreds of headlines, but more like 10 a day, or 10 a week. If you've ever gone to a web site only to find there's no new content since your last visit, or forget to check it because it's updated so infrequently, or if you've missed content because it fell off the front page since your last visit - these are the problem RSS solves.

Personally, I like having a single interface for almost all of the content I like to read on the web. News sites will usually only syndicate the headline and a blurb, but most of the most popular blogs syndicate the entire item, so there's rarely even a need to click through to the web site to read it. I organize my feeds into folders - "Technology", "Politics", etc. It all gets aggregated into one place, and I can effectively read 5-10 sites at once, without seeing what I read already and without ever missing something new. In total I'm subscribed to about 70 feeds that I read - I honestly can't imagine that it would be possible to keep up with that much content manually checking all those sites.

If you've ever used e-mail alerts, it's quite similar, only a better implementation. Another close analog would be usenet, where newsgroups would be downloaded into your reader and there's a distinction between what you've read and haven't.

Plus, there's other uses of the technology besides getting headlines. I wouldn't subscribe to an RSS feed for the weather, but weather widgets certainly make use of them. It's obviously critical to podcasting. My Yahoo and other personalized portals make use of them, and "Friends pages" on social networking sites like Livejournal work by utilizing the RSS feeds. I haven't seen it implemented yet, but it's not hard to imagine their utility for pushing software updates in the future, and there's probably a dozen other uses.

I really wish they had integrated Google Reader Google Reader in Gmail, ending up with somenting like Bloglines, rather than this crappy webclips that comes in the way distracting me while I try to concentrate on my emails (yes, I just disabled them)

Don't think I've ever seen CmdrTaco reply in comments, but I'd love to hear his reasons for this. I've gone the hardcore geeky route with rss2email and also the true standalone desktop aggregator route. What I've settled on is Bloglines, because I use 4 machines in different locations quite frequently. Bloglines simply makes this easiest and maintains state perfectly between all 4. I'm on win2k, XP, and OSX on those 4 machines. The Bloglines notifier extension for Firefox is quite handy as well.

FeedDemon - yeah, to get your $25 worth it helps to OPML and how to transform XML, but that's what I like about it.

Straw - for when I'm in the Gnome .

BlogLines - web-native but with an API to die for.

AmphetaDesk - around for a while, great if you like shooting your foot of in Perl.

NewsGator - for Outlook - still, you can tweak it to feed event-extended RSS into your task calendar.

rss2Email - for when my Knoppix install has nothing better to do.

SharpReader - not as good as FeedDemon, but less expensive. There are a few others, the WikiPedia has a good handle on that - point is, how is the IBM tool different than all of the above? Are they not going to use RSS or ATOM feeds?

Bloglines is a web based reader that works well in my opinion. The great advantage is that I can check my feeds from anywhere in the world with my smartphone.

I've been using Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/ for about a year, and find it does a great job of aggregating rss, xml, atom and other kinds of feeds. I can move from machine to machine without a problem.

Would there be any advantage in switching to something like rssowl or liferea?

Why do I need a seperate program to view this type of content? Doesn't it make more sense to implement such an implementation in a browser? Personally, I have been using Bloglines for a long time (and more recently netvibes). Google and Microsoft also seem to be going this way.

Of course, as long as an application supports the importing and exporting of OPML it doesn't matter what you use, because switching is easy. However, I can't really justify running a whole seperate application that seems to do little other than launching Firefox anyway.

The interface stinks. I much prefer BlogLines.

Um, that's the whole point of online RSS readers. If a blog doesn't want you to read their news without visiting their site, then they shouldn't publish an RSS feed. The caching is actually a nice benefit as it decreases the number of repeated hits to your feed. bloglines has been doing this for a while. If a site wants to publish a feed but also wants advertising revenue they can insert ads in their feed or only publish a short portion of the entry in the feed so that someone has to go to the site to see the rest.

This is interesting: We the Bloggers... by: Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines team - Blogs have given individuals of any and every background the ability to freely speak their minds and share information with anyone who chooses to read it, at any time they wish to do so. Bloglines was created for people as a window to access this world of dynamic content and a way to participate in its creation. We believe blogs have helped enable an open exchange of information that has never before been possible. As some of you may have heard, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is reviewing its regulations concerning political speech on the Internet, including blog activity. Bloglines is committed to the continuation of open exchanges of information and opinions throughout the blogosphere and the Internet in general. Today, the Committee on House Administration is having a hearing on this issue. In the spirit of these beliefs, I have provided the Committee with the following statement. We encourage you to express your opinion on this matter in any forum you choose.

We should note that Yahoo news has implemented this features months ago. Just make a search and the orange xml button will appear in the results page. You can even use rss auto-discovery (the rss feed in describe in the html meta tags). If you are a bloglines user, you can click in their bookmarklet, and automagically subscribe to the feed.

Start.com was well under way before Google's personalized home page was released. Google's Personalized Page was released in May, but Start.com was up in March. See this post from March 20th by one of the developers.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/steverider/Blog/cns! 1pk-KGuQJt62IHSwXT8uY1HQ!378.entry

Also, Bloglines Citations of Start.com dating back to March 9th or so

http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www. start.com

And technorati of course:

http://www.technorati.com/search/start.com/1/?star t=140

You might want to look at Bloglines. It's a free, web based, RSS aggregator.

This has the advantage of remembering which articles that you've already seen if you view your feeds from multiple locations. As it's web based, your Firefox AdBlock is built in.

It also offers a simpler interface designed for mobile devices if you have the capability of accessing the web on the move.

Stop the machine.

Something like Bloglines? (now owned by AskJeeves)

Which would automatically gather all of the RSS feeds into a single location we could then just subscribe to that one server and pick all the feeds we like...

Hang on, where have I heard of this before?

I know what you are up to, but anyway: RSS aggregator web service

This really saves me some time and is comfortable like I wouldn't believe.

Didn't we just read about how PR begets bullshit news stories? Case in point: TFA. Really, there's nothing but crap in that article. Taking a step back, it looks like it has a lot to do with Rojo's launch and a bit to do with NewsGator. Of course, we all know the best aggregator is going to be Gmail...once it trickles down. For now, Bloglines will suffice. And no, reading/subscribing to hundreds of feeds does not take more time than actually visiting all the sites. What the hell?

If we developers can produce easily used, real RSS clients, with adequate support, these serverside aggregators will pave the way for people to take control of our news consumption.

It's been done. Bloglines is lowers the bar to RSS use slightly, but there's still too large of a barrier for most normal people to overcome. First you have to explain what RSS is, then copy the link to each RSS feed you want and paste it into Bloglines. If the site doesn't provide an explicit link to the feed (which they really shouldn't have to if they include a link tag pointing to it in the HTML), then they might have to wade through the HTML to find it. They also have to install a notifier to get the full, I'm-plugged-straight-into-the-Internet benefits that RSS feeds make possible. What normal users need is a web browser that tells them when an RSS feed is present, but does so without them needing to know much about RSS. Firefox does this sufficiently well for most novice users, but most novice users don't use Firefox. I assume Safari does it well also.

Internet Explorer is the barrier to RSS adoption.

Ask Jeeves, Inc. also owns Bloglines.

Did InterActive own any blog type services prior to this acquisition?

Bloglines tilts my axis. RSS readers are cool, but I read from multiple computers. A single tracker is excellent. It also provides pretty good links to related feeds and has a few nice sorting features, such as sorting feeds by the number of unread entries.

quoting from http://bloglines.com/topblogs
is it just me, or it seems like someone from google has anonymously responded to all speculation. very interesting.

note that the following, like so much that has come before it in this thread, is pure speculation. Let's think about this for a moment: The day Mark started at Google he created a weblog with the express purpose of talking about his experiences as a new Google employee. He left a good job at Microsoft to relocate and take a job at Google knowing full well in advance what the stock price, options package and salary would be, then goes on to criticize all of the above upon his arrival. The first question that springs to my mind is "why did he leave Microsoft?" The second is, "what happened that we-the-blogosphere don't know about?" Mark's blog went down for several days, and when it came back it was with minor redactions and a comment from Mark that Google's management was being "pretty cool about this." Several days later Mark left the company. Who here thinks the folks at Google spent a few days deciding whether to fire Mark, and who thinks perhaps they investigated what information Mark might have been sharing with his personal friends, many of whom work for Microsoft? Mark already showed poor judgement with his blogging (there's a difference between having a blog that doesn't exclude your work life and having a blog specifically mandated to detail your workplace). The outsider has to wonder: if Mark is so free on his blog, what would he say to his Microsoft friends when they ask about what cool stuff Google's working on? Well, you and I have to wonder, but if Mark was responding to those emails from his work address you can bet Google doesn't have to wonder. Two understated truisms in cases like these are that people who have loose lips on their blogs often have looser lips when talking to their trusted friends, and that when someone is fired and can point to their weblog as the reason will often do so to throw the blame somewhere other than themselves. A person might find it harder to find his next job after being fired for blogging, but how much harder woould it be to get hired if you were fired for revealing information to friends who happened to work for a rival company?

The new blogs is missing the critical pieces. Fortunately, the contents of the previous blog are cached here.

Here are some relevant paragraphs:

January 24, 2005

uh oh, what happened to my bank account?

By markjen

so i happened to look over my finances this past weekend and i realized something: i'm broke. which is odd, because i had a bunch of liquid capital in my checking account last time i checked, and now all of a sudden i have nothing.

i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck (which i haven't received yet). finally, add in the fact that i had to put down two months rent as a deposit for my new lease, and i'm flat broke.

on the plus side, this first paycheck is going to be huge... (which unfortunately means i'll probably end up getting taxed huge on it. doh!)

which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output. not to mention that most people think this is a great "benefit" and google gets a ton of positive press on it. in short, this "benefit" is designed benefit the company, not the employee.

then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work. i'm not going to say this isn't convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.

next, let's look at the health care benefit provided. arguably, this is the biggest benefit companies pay out for their employees. google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like google settle for being on par? microsoft's health care benefits shame google's relatively meager offering. for those of you who don't know, microsoft pays 100% of employees' premiums for a world-class PPO. everything you can possibly imagine is covered. the program has no co-pays on anything (including prescription drugs); you can self-refer to any doctor in the blue cross blue shield network, which pretty much means any licensed professional; and you can even get up to 24 hour-long massage sessions per year.

lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren't as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things acc

Check out http://bloglines.com/topblogs. I bet somebody there might object to tampering.

The official press release at Bloglines.

Bloglines have confirmed it.
Announcement page
Press release
FAQ about acquisition

Bloglines have confirmed it.
Announcement page
Press release
FAQ about acquisition

Bloglines have confirmed it.
Announcement page
Press release
FAQ about acquisition

Heres the official confirmtation

One, I keep a tightly-knit friends-list, and sadly enough, those people would not read my journal regularly if it were not on Livejournal.

Well, you could set up a WordPress blog and use LivePress to copy the entries to your LJ.

Also, you could try Bloglines, an online RSS aggregator which is like a much improved friends page.

Personally, I love Bloglines, which comes with a nifty Firefox extension to let you know when your blogs (and any RSS feeds) have been updated. I think the website-with-client method is one of the best options; you can still get quick notification of new stuff, but it reduces the bandwidth taken by the feed (the server gets it once and then sends it on to however-many-thousand-people are subscribed; 21,865 subscribers in /.'s case). It's also got a decent recommendation system, and overall it makes checking up on a broad variety of news sites much, much easier.

I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.

It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.

I've been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us since it started (check here for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL , written by Robin Millette , lets you type an URL and see if some other people already "delicious'ed it." And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for 'popularity contests.' But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn't have thought of, they don't compare to del.icio.us. Read more for lots of examples...

As I'm not sure if I convinced you, let's start with a real blog, Smart Mobs .

If I feed the URL http://www.smartmobs.com/ to Bloglines by submitting the search string "http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www .smartmobs.com/&submit=Search," I receive 3358 unsorted results.

If I do the same with Technorati , I find 1,614 links from 1,234 sources, sorted by date.

In both cases, this produces a number of references which is hard to browse. Why a particular site has quoted Smart Mobs? It's not obvious to find an answer.

So, it's time to use DURL, which returns a more manageable number of 45 results from del.icio.us.

http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_1.jpg

Here is a screen capture of the page returned by DURL. You can see that some people are reading Smart Mobs because they associated it with the concepts of "creativity" or "ubiquitous computing". Others are using tags such as "collaboration," "mobile" or "community." (Credit: Robin Millette/del.icio.us).

Let's check for example the tag "Social Software."

http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_2.jpg

It brings us to del.icio.us/hbryant/social_software . (Credit: del.icio.us). Wow! Exciting! New tools for del.icio.us! Let's visit Soooo del.icio.us people can't stand it! .

In a summary, with only two clicks, I found a gold mine. Do you know another service which is that efficient?

Now, let's return to the previous page and check the link to the "community" tag.

http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_3.jpg

This time, this leads us to del.icio.us/oubiwann/community . (Credit: del.icio.us). From there, I can now read a "definition of Mundialization" or discover what is the "World Government of World Citizens."

The more I use del.icio.us, the more I like it. This doesn't mean I'm not using Bloglines or Technorati, but I'm using them for 'exhaustivity,' not for 'discovery.'

[And here is an additional note for Robin Millette, the author of DURL. In fact, you can do the same search on del.icio.us by adding the string "http://del.icio.us/url?url=" (without the quotes) before the URL you want to see if it has been delicioused. But it might be too geeky for some of you.]

Source: Robin Millette, December 20, 2004; and various websites

The top links displays also have RSS feeds (see http://www.bloglines.com/rss/{toplinks_inc,toplink s,toplinks_dec}).

And, through the Bloglines API, (see our API section), you can access all of your subscriptions as RSS 2.0 feeds. There are several open-source projects based on the Bloglines API, and several desktop-based aggregators have integrated the API as well.

Hope this helps.

There are several ways to mitigate the bandwidth issues. First, all aggregators should support gzip compression and the HTTP last-modified and etags headers. That'll take care of a lot of the problems. The other solution is to get people to use server based aggregators, like Bloglines, which only fetch a feed once per iteration, regardless of how many subscribers there are. As a bonus, there are several things that server-based aggregators can do that desktop based aggregators can't do, like provide personalized recommendations. I like this solution, but of course I'm biased since I'm the founder of Bloglines. :)