Tomorrow morning around 5am Pacific Time, a press release with the title New Bloglines Web Services Selected by FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot to Eliminate RSS Bandwidth Bottleneck will go out, but I’m so excited I’m going to blog about it now. So what is this? First, continuing a tradition we started with the notifiers, we’re augmenting the data that you can pull out of Bloglines programmatically. We’re calling the new functions the Bloglines Web Services and we’ve launched a whole new part of the web site to document them.

At Bloglines, we have 3 classes of machines in our cluster. We’ve got web boxes, which are pretty lightweight. We’ve got storage class machines, which as you can guess have big drives and medium speed processors. And we have database class machines, which have fast processors, fast disk, and lots of ECC memory. Fast disk, in general, means some form of SCSI. The database machines use Ultra SCSI drives, specifically Seagate Cheetah Ultra320s in a RAID configuration.

We pushed out a couple of cool new features last night on Bloglines. First is ‘Keep New’, which lets you mark individual blog entries as unread. The second is ‘Related Feeds’, which are a list of feeds that are similar to the feed you’re reading. This compliments the Bloglines Recommendations, which are personalized for each user. Also, there’s a great article on us in the San Jose Mercury News today (Yahoo link because the Merc changes URLs and puts things behind registration after a day).

I just got back from Foo Camp up in Sebastopol. I had a blast, and want to thank Tim O’Reilly and Marc Hedlund for the invite. The intellectual firepower there was amazing, and everyone was really friendly and open. Here are some pictures of the weekend by Mark Frauenfelder. I always love meeting Bloglines users and getting their feedback, and I was pleased to find that many of the attendees were indeed already Bloglines users.

The other day, on Scoble’s blog, he announced that MSDN was having problems keeping up with the bandwidth demands of RSS aggregators. Well, if Microsoft can’t handle it, then it’s definitely a problem, right? Many people have chimed in about solutions, mostly involving existing HTTP standards and reducing the size of the feeds served. These are all good ideas. I don’t have time to get into a lot of the technical stuff right now, but one really good recommendation is put forth by FeedDemon’s Nick Bradbury.

Really great quote from The RSS Weblog on a survey done of aggregator users: Bloglines is on fire. A ton of people use it and love it enough to evangelize it. It’s true, and we’re grateful for our wonderful users. Our stats continue to show a ‘hockey stick’ growth curve. And of course we’ve got some really great new features on the way.

In Analysis of an artificial meme, Greg analyzed the data generated by the GoMeme experiment launched by Nova Spivak. It doesn’t appear that the experiment yielded much info on how memes propagate, but what was interesting to me was the raw data, which can be found in an XML file at the end of the article. It contains the raw responses of the participants. One bit of information people were asked to include was which aggregator they used.

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been busy. Busy is good. As we continue to build out the team at Bloglines, I was reminded of something that first occured to me during ONElist’s early days about starting a company. As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it’s all about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary, a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a company.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

Dave asks why Bloglines uses a 3-pane interface. I guess Dave has never tried Bloglines, because we don’t use a 3-pane interface. I happen to completely agree with Dave that a 3-pane interface is the wrong interface for an aggregator. My guess is that if Dave tried Bloglines, he’d really like it. Bloglines uses a two-pane interface, which gives a little more flexibility than the single-page interface Dave likes. But here’s the thing.