This morning, we announced the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit. I’ve been playing with a development version of this for the past couple of weeks, and I think it’s fantastic. The toolkit extends Mozilla, embedding a Bloglines notifier into it, and adding several features to the right-click menu. Some of the things it makes easy to do: Find references for the page you’re viewing Find references to a link within the page you’re viewing Search for a term by just highlighting it Subscribe to the page you’re viewing (like the easy subscribe bookmarklet) It really makes Mozilla even more useful.

Two things you need to worry about when running a server cluster are power and heat. Machines today may be small, but they put out a lot of heat and they suck up a lot of power. Many colocation centers (places where you keep your servers), weren’t designed for handling a lot of small servers that generate a lot of heat. This means, for example, that with Bloglines we can’t completely fill an entire rack at the colocation center with thin servers.

This morning we introduced a new Bloglines feature. If another feed has linked to an item that you’re reading, there will be a ‘References’ link under the item with a count of the number of references to that item. Clicking on that will bring up a list of all the items from other feeds that have linked to the item you’re reading. It’s a great way to follow conversations and see different viewpoints.

Tom Biro of The Media Drop has posted an interview he did with me recently. He asked some great questions, and it was a pleasure to do the interview. I talk about Bloglines and some of my earlier experiences. Thanks Tom!

I learned a lot of things during the tech bubble of the 1990s. One of the more interesting things was how to read an S-1. An S-1 is the main document that private companies file with the SEC as a precursor to going public. The S-1 is supposed to list every detail about the company that a potential investor would consider relevent when evaluating whether to buy stock in the company.

Sorry for being quiet here lately. We’ve been hard at work on several things, the first of which we announced this morning. The new Top Links listing is a ranking of the most popular links of the past 24 hours from the blogs that we index. It’s based on a a new links database backend that you can search using the Citations page. As Google has proven, links are the currency of the web.

So I guess that Google’s new Gmail web-mail service isn’t a hoax after all. Kudos to them for the publicity stunt of announcing on April Fools. More importantly, it sounds like they’ve got the right idea about storage, giving each user 1 gigabyte of storage. I think this is absolutely the correct thing to do. Economically, it doesn’t cost Google much to provide this (storage approaches free over time, and most people won’t use up that gig, at least not immediately).

Wow, a flurry of Bloglines related activity today. First up, Jeremy Zawodny posts that he’s switching to Bloglines. Thanks! If you or any other user has any suggestions for how we can improve the service, please tell us, by either using the comment submission form on the web site or by sending email to support (at) bloglines.com. Next, we’re mentioned briefly in the latest Wired magazine, in an article on RSS.

For kicks, I just figured out how much usable disc space Bloglines has between all the machines that run the service. With the recent addition of a couple of servers to support some upcoming features, I believe we’ve passed the 1 terabyte mark. That’s in usable disc space, not raw. All of our various databases run on RAIDs, so the raw disc space number is actually much higher than that. Of course not all of that disc space is being used right now.

I attended the Future Salon presentation by Dave Sifry on Technorati last night. This was the first time I had met Dave, and he struck me as one of those instantly likeable types. It was a good presentation and I have a lot of respect for what they’re doing at Technorati. Even though there is some functionality overlap between Bloglines and Technorati, which will probably increase over time, I think we serve different audiences.