Yes, the rumors are true and we’re all really excited. Now that that is out of the way, I’ll try to answer some questions. I won’t be going anywhere. I’m fully committed to Bloglines, and we’ve got great things in store. The Bloglines web site will keep on going, business as usual. One of the things we liked about Ask Jeeves is their multi-brand strategy, and we’ll be operating as one of their independent brands.

I recently purchased a Canon Powershot G6 digital camera. I’m really happy with it and it takes great pictures. So now, without further ado, pictures of my cats! First up is Babe, who was named after Babe Ruth, because she was found at Crusher Stadium: Another picture of Babe: And here’s Einstein. The name is ironic; he’s not the brightest bulb in the bunch, but he’s a good guy: Next, if you ask really nicely, I’ll post pictures of some of my favorite socks.

Richard MacManus has been trying to figure out aggregator market share based on stats from his own blog. It’s really interesting reading, and the comments are very good as well. He puts Bloglines at 50% of the aggregator market, although he implies (and I agree) that hard numbers are difficult to come by. Seperately, a lot can be gleaned from the live traffic stats that BoingBoing publishes. Kirk Scott ran the numbers, and he came up with the following.

I’ll be attending the BloggerCon conference this Saturday. I’ll also be at the dinner at Mings on Friday night, and the Aggregators dinner at the Fish Market on Saturday. It promises to be a full weekend. Bloglines is pleased to help support BloggerCon, and I’m looking forward to the conference. If you’re attending one of these events, please say hi. I always enjoy talking with Bloglines users, and I’m always looking for feedback and suggestions for how we can improve the service.

The idea of podcasting, while having been around for a couple of years, seems to have really taken off in the past few weeks. What’s really exciting for me is seeing people use the Bloglines Web Services API to create new and interesting podcasting clients. There’s Doppler Radio which has been out for a couple of days. And I just saw an announcement of the Bloglines Enclosure Download Script. We’ll be adding these to the Bloglines Web Services section of the web site.

Previously I had mentioned how we were having problems with Seagate drives. On the flip side, I’d like to point out two exceptional companies, HP and Sleepycat Software. In production, we use several HP Procurve switches. These are devices that connect the various machines in the Bloglines cluster. Like some other aspects of our cluster, we’ve bought several of these off eBay, which even several years after the bubble burst, is still a good source for cheap computer hardware.

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.

I continue to be amazed at the activity surrounding our announcement last week of the Bloglines Web Services. Several libraries have been quickly developed to interface with the BWS, and several aggregators have been working on supporting the services. I think I’ve even seen a Bloglines IM notifier client. We just opened up a set of forums for developers to talk about the BWS. In other Bloglines news, there was a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today talking about RSS and Bloglines.

All I can say is “Wow!” We thought people would be interested in the BWS, but the overwhelmingly positive response was beyond our expectations. Thanks! Here are just a few items on the announcement: Eweek : Bloglines Tackles RSS Bandwidth Issue O’Reilly : The New Bloglines Web Services, which was then Slashdotted Someone has already written a BWS Perl Module. This is fantastic! Links to Blogllines, the announcement and the new services section of the web site dominate today’s Top Gaining Links So, to everyone, thanks for the support!