Apparently several thousand blogs hosted at weblogs.com are now off the air (see this for more information). Bloglines archives all blog entries that we crawl (over 70 million at last count). If you have one of the affected blogs, and your blog was crawled by Bloglines, then we have at least some of your site archived (everything from the time we started crawling your site). We can dump the entries out into a text file, which will hopefully help in migration.

Thursday morning, I’ll be a guest on the RSS Weekly webcast. The topic this week is ‘How are news readers evolving? What will they become?’’. You’ll hear me talk about how Bloglines will evolve into a cure for world hunger, a method to end global warming, and a floor wax as well as a dessert topping. Oh, and an end to root canals and other dental maladies. I could talk about all of that and more.

This is fantastic. PCWorld’s latest issue has a review of some of the top aggregators, News on Demand. They gave Bloglines the highest ranking of any of the aggregators, tied with Feeddemon. They didn’t talk about some of the features that are completely unique to Bloglines, like personalized recommendations, email subscriptions, and references, but it’s still a great review.

Sorry I’ve been quiet lately, but I’ve been busy busy busy. I just wanted to mention a couple of things: Dave Winer is asking for reviews of aggregators. If you’re a Bloglines user, would you consider writing a review? Speaking of Dave, I sincerely appreciate the effort that he is leading to clarify the RSS 2.0 spec in regards to escaping practices, especially as they currently exist. Clarity is good. Finally, I really appreciate the efforts of Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim in building test cases for Atom and RSS.

A Scan of the Headline Scanners:“Bloglines is free, powerful and intuitive, making it a good choice for those new to RSS. You can subscribe to hundreds of feeds without slowing the service (or your computer). It handles categories of feeds beautifully and has a strong search feature.” Thanks Ryan!

As announced this morning, we introduced several new Top Links features. In addition to seeing the overall list of most popular links for the past day, you can now view just the top gaining links or just the top declining links for the past day. These listings are a great way to find out what people are talking about every day. In addition, you can now use Bloglines or another reader to subscribe to RSS feeds of these pages.

Harold Check’s interview with me has been posted on the RSS Weblog. Harold asked some great questions and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about Bloglines and the world of syndication.

With the announcement yesterday of the beta version of Google Groups 2, Yahoo Groups now has serious competition. I’m not a disinterested party in this latest Yahoo vs Google battle. I started ONElist, which morphed into eGroups, which was acquired by Yahoo and is now Yahoo Groups. That was in September of 2000. I know and appreciate the power and utility of mailing lists. I am also friends with the people running both services, and without exception they are great engineers.

Congratulations to Dave, Brandon, Gaku and the rest of the team for launching the beta version of Google Groups 2. I’ve only played with it for a little bit but it looks good so far. Now here’s one of the really interesting things. The new groups is an intersection of USENET and mailing lists, and every group has two Atom feeds, one for topic summaries and the other for message summaries.

A few miscellaneous things: We rolled out enclosure support in Boglines today. Reaction to the release of the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit yesterday has been fantastic. I’m not surprised, it’s a super cool piece of code. Bloglines will have some downtime late Friday night. We’ve run out of space in our current location at the co-lo, so we need to move. The Internet Archive is building a Petabox or 1,000 terabyte storage system.