Of course, if you ask my family, they’ll tell you I’ve had an ego problem for awhile now. But now, with this piece from Jon Udell over at Infoworld, I’m just going to be completely unbearable to be around. :) Since last fall, I’ve been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced users.

Courtesy of the fine Six Apart folk, I’ll be at the Blog On conference tomorrow. I always enjoy meeting Bloglines users, so if you’re one and at the conference tomorrow, please introduce yourself. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the dinner/party afterwards, but I’ll try.

With the launch of the new Bloglines user interface a couple of weeks ago, we started publishing subscriber numbers for every blog in the system. Previously, we had only listed subscribers who had public profiles enabled, which is a small percentage of the subscriber base. Now, we include a total subscriber count with each feed. Richard MacManus has some interesting thoughts as he analyzes this information.

Chad Dickerson has a really interesting article up at Infoworld in which he talks about the problem with desktop RSS aggregators: Fast forwarding to the present, InfoWorld.com now sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity at the top of every hour, presumably because most people configure their newsreaders to wake up at that time to pull their feeds. If I didn’t know how RSS worked, I would think we were being slammed by a bunch of zombies sitting on compromised home PCs.

There’s a great article in the Wall Street Journal’s Personal Technology section this morning talking about blogs and aggregation. From the article: Overall, I had the best experience with a service called Bloglines, and I recommend it, especially for beginners. Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) works as a Web service, which means there’s no software to install and you can catch up with your blogs from any Web browser. Fantastic! Update: I’ve changed the link to point to the free version of the article.

By now you may have heard about or seen the changes we made to Bloglines last night. We upgraded the user interface and added several new features, including the ability to sort subscriptions. Also, every Bloglines user now gets his or her own blog, and the tools to easily post items to it from their subscriptions. With such large scale changes as these, there are always little issues that come up, and we’re working to address them.

Bloglines has been listed as one of TIme Magazine’s 50 Best Websites. Does that not rock? Yes, that does indeed rock. Fully.

Wednesday night, I’ll emerge from my undisclosed location to attend Joi Ito’s pre-Supernova conference party. I love talking with Bloglines users, so if that’s you, and you are one of the approximately 1.0E24 other attendees of this event, look me up. We’ve got some great things cooking for Bloglines, but we’re always looking for more ways to improve the service.