Update and Business Week Article

The last couple of weeks I’ve been busy with travel and work. And I had the misfortune of coming back from New York with a nasty cold. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t progressing with Bloglines. We’re in the middle of one of our hardware upgrade cycles - we generally have to add machines to the Bloglines cluster every few months to keep up with growth. This past month, the API announcement and all the press has accelerated the latest upgrade cycle. Always a good problem to have. We’re also completing some back-end architecture work that I’m really excited about. Just because an Internet service is scalable, that doesn’t mean you’re not always working on it to continue to scale it. Scalability is not an endpoint, it’s definitely a journey. On Friday, a great article on RSS and Aggregators appeared in Business Week. Here’s the first paragraph:

Sarah Houghton used to get her online news the traditional way: by visiting 10 of her favorite sites several times a day. But since joining the free online service Bloglines a year ago, the San Rafael (Calif.) librarian surfs no more. Now the news comes to her. Using software known as RSS – for Really Simple Syndication – Bloglines pulls together regular updates from a variety of sites. Houghton can check them each time she logs on to the service. “RSS is the primary tool I use to get news,” says Houghton, 27. “It’s all delivered to me; I don’t have to go searching anymore.”

Update: I’ve added the link to the Business Week article, and I forgot to mention a great article that appeared on NewsForge last week, Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable.