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).