"...now's a good time to let us know what features you want us to add to make Bloglines better and easier.

Whoever wants to post their Top 5 list for Bloglines here, we're all ears."

I think that's a great idea, but I'd like to open it up to other web-based RSS Aggregators too. If you want to give Bloglines, Rojo, or any other web-based RSS Aggregator advice on features you want to see - here's the place to do it. I know that senior management at both Bloglines and Rojo are watching this thread, so your comments will definitely be taken on board by them. I'm sure that's true of other Aggregator companies too.

Note that for the sake of keeping this conversation focused, this is only about web-based RSS Aggregators - not desktop apps. We'll deal with the latter another time.

So please click here to give your suggestions to Bloglines, Rojo and others.

Update, 4/10/05: Keep the comments coming. 22 at this point, but it'd be good to get some more for Rojo and the other web-based aggregators.

A couple of things set Regator apart from other RSS aggregators like Bloglines, Newsgator, or Google Reader. First of all, Regator only offers a set of roughly 3000 blogs to subscribe to, as well as 'channels,' like Technology, Politics, Sports, etc.

You can't import your own OPML files or subscribe to blogs from outside of Regator. While this is clearly meant to keep things simple for Regator's user base, it does limit its usefulness for more advanced users. You can, however, nominate your favorite blogs to be added to Regator's catalog.

Another difference between Regator and other RSS aggregators is that while Regator opens in a River of News style view, the default view is organized by popularity, not chronology. Users can vote up or down on every post and those votes determine the position of the posts on the site. Regator does have the option to switch to a chronological view.

While Regator does not feature any social networking or sharing functions yet, users can comment on blog posts, though those comments stay within the Regator silo.

Only Summaries

One thing that might make bloggers happy, but makes Regator just a little bit less useful is the fact that it only displays summaries and not the full text of all blog posts. It also doesn't display any pictures from those blog posts, even if they are part of the summary. Regator says they are doing this to give back to the bloggers featured on the site. Given the many discussions around full feeds and community sites lately, they are definitely doing the right thing, especially because Regator has comments on its site.

Audio and Video

Besides blog posts, Regator also functions as a podcast and video player. Posts with embedded media like mp3 files or YouTube videos will display those in either a pop-up player for videos or a little audio player at the bottom of the screen (see screenshot). Especially the audio player is a nifty solution, as you can keep browsing the site while the player stays out of the way at the bottom of the page.

Verdict

Overall, Regator seems like a very well thought out product. Finding blogs and channels to read is easy and the "What's Hot" bar on the right side gives you a quick overview of what the most hotly debated topics in the blogosphere are right now. The green theme, which can't be changed, might not be everybody's cup of tea, but the layout of the site works very well.

Invites

Regator has given us 100 invites - you can claim yours by heading to Regator's homepage and using 'readwriteweb' as your invite code.

- del.icio.us now has 1.5 million users, according to the official blog; Also talks about doing "more meaningful joint development work" with its parent company Yahoo, including re-doing the UI.

- Amazon Q4 Announcements; sales up 34% including "for the first time, non-Media dollar growth [e.g. electronics] exceeded Media dollar growth"; also interesting notes about endless.com, their experimental shoe and handbag website, and a 55% increase in developers registered to use Amazon Web Services (now over 220,000 developers). See also ZDNet's analysis.

- Digg continues the War On Gaming; Kevin Rose says they are removing the Top Diggers list and are also aiming to improve social networking via interests (i.e. topics).

- WSJ profiles Netvibes, Pageflakes; Walt Mossberg concludes that "Netvibes -- and competitors like Pageflakes -- will give My Yahoo a run for its money. They provide an easy way to cut through the clutter of information that confronts us all." It'll be interesting to see if Yahoo develops its own personalized start page, or whether they'll acquire Netvibes or Pageflakes...

- The Web Profile Aggregators; Frank Gruber has a great post outlining all the Web identity aggregators - and there are a lot of them! Frank recommends Spokeo, but he has good things to say about most of them.

* AltaVista -> Google
* Napster -> iTunes
* VisiCalc -> Lotus 123 -> Excel
* Word Perfect -> Word
* Netscape -> Internet Explorer
* Apple Newton -> Palm Pilot -> Blackberry
* IBM PC -> Compaq -> Dell
* Double Click -> Google Ad Sense
* Ofoto -> Flickr
* Compuserve -> AOL -> @Home -> Comcast & Verizon

That list is similar to Tim O'Reilly's list of Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0 companies. Tim mentioned two of the same examples in his list:

DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr

Don suggests that inferior management decisions rather than inferior technology was the main reason why the 2.0 companies usurped the 1.0 ones.

My thoughts

It's also interesting to look at all the Web 1.0 companies that have continued their success in the 2.0 era. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Microsoft too. All of those companies are known for their smart business management, as well as continuing to innovate and react to disruptive technologies.

Also of note is that a few of the old 1.0 companies are now attempting to re-invent themselves as 2.0 companies - e.g. Lycos building a "social interaction platform". In those cases, you have to wander whether it's a case of 'slow follower' and will it be enough?

Finally, the same principle of 'fast followers' can be applied on a micro scale to segments within 2.0. One example is RSS Aggregators, where Bloglines was the dominant force in Aggregators 1.0. I'd suggest we've entered the 2.0 era of Aggregators now and products such as tech.memeorandum are beginning to make their presence felt.

Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.

There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).

According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.

The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow

Interesting that this comes out at the same time as Microsoft confirming it will integrate RSS across its MSN online services throughout the year. eWeek reports that in 2-3 weeks time MSN will release "a third version of Start, its Web-based aggregator prototype". This is a quote from Kyle Von Haden, an MSN program manager:

Indeed... more updates on the Google and Microsoft stories as they develop.

My Initial Thoughts

One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators. Certainly MSN's start.com is heading in this direction - it remains to be seen whether Google's "personalized homepage" will do the same.

How it works: new users click the 'Create listing on edgeio' button and are first invited to register for an account. After that the user is taken to a WYSIWYG editor to enter their listing:

Once they've entered their details, a new blog is created. Coming soon is skinning and personalized URLs. Essentially this is a blogging platform that non-technical people will find easy to personalize. Even so, it'll be interesting to see how many people do continue to use their personal edgeio blog. The jury is out on whether this will entice more people to be bloggers.

Another new feature is that old-hand bloggers can now add their posts to Edgeio, without needing to tag them in their own blog authoring tool. Users simply enter their blog URL into edgeio's 'Get listings' textbox (on the homepage), click the button and a list of  their latest posts display. This is a useful feature for people like me, who don't bother tagging their posts - even though we know we should.

I think we'll see similar tools being created for the Structured Blogging initiative in future (nb: I'm currently re-designing the SB website). If you recall Structured Blogging supplies tools for people to create posts that have extra metadata, so that niche aggregators can automatically harvest them. For example, what if someone wanted to do a movie review - but they don't have a blog? A Structured Blogging aggregator that specializes in movie reviews could provide the same 'instant blogging' tool that edgeio provides its users, enabling non-bloggers to quickly create a movie review on their platform. Likewise the instant tagging feature that edgeio has can be applied to Structured Blogging aggregators.

When you think about it, edgeio is one of the pioneering Structured Blogging aggregators - even though they don't use SB tools or microformats such as hListings.

Back in 2005, though, we called Bloglines the "Google of RSS," and even today, Bloglines is still slightly ahead of Google Reader in terms of its user base.

Also in 2005, a number of long discussions about advertising on Bloglines and in RSS aggregators in general kept the blogosphere quite busy. Back then, many publishers protested when Bloglines announced that it was planning to put contextual ads next to their content, and in the end, Bloglines backed off from the idea and did not feature any advertising on its site until today. This early controversy around advertising in RSS aggregators probably also led most of Bloglines' competitors like Newsgator or Google Readerto shy away from putting ads on their services as well.

For Now, Ads on Start Page Only

The difference this time, however, is that Bloglines is only putting the ads on the start page, where Bloglines only displays information about the service itself and doesn't feature any external content. According to a post on the Bloglines blog, Bloglines is also pursuing other monetization options within the feed reader, though the post does not go into any specifics.

This week: Aggregators trendy, Yahoo News vs Google News, Rupert Murdoch on the Mount, RSS Readers in bloom, new kinds of Kool-Aid.

Aggregators Trending Upwards

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and analyst firm Outsell released a report on the Information Industry this week. They estimate the industry is worth $250 billion. What stood out like a sore thumb is that "General Aggregators, Distributors & Services" was up 25% from 2003 to 2004, the largest percentage growth among the segments tracked.

With preliminary 2004 Revenue of $33,002 million, General Aggregators is now the third-largest segment in the Information Industry - behind News & Trade ($88,970 million, 8% increase) and Education & Training ($34,574 million, 7% increase).

Now it's not entirely clear how the SIIA and Outsell define "General Aggregators, Distributors & Services" (presumably you have to pay for that information). In any case, it's a fair bet that it'll make more inroads into "News & Trade" in the 2005 year...

News about Yahoo News and Google News

I wrote about the Yahoo News re-design this week. Basically I was very impressed with their RSS adoption and use of topic feeds. Yahoo also recently introduced custom RSS feeds for Yahoo News. So they're making all the right moves, as I noted in yesterday's post RSS and The Big 3.

Meanwhile Google News has some issues - they're being challenged by Associated News (AP), they're inconsistent about which news sources they allow onto their pages, and they rather strangely don't offer RSS feeds.

Rupert Murdoch's Sermon From The Mount

What happens when the high priest of mass media preaches the Gospel According To Jeff Jarvis? The media faithful listen intently, that's what (and perhaps pray). This week aussie media tycoon Rupert Murdoch delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Quoth Rupert:

Amen to that brother!

May a Thousand RSS Readers Bloom

There are a lot of RSS Aggregators out in the market right now. Just this week I saw two new names: YellowBrix and AggRead. Rojo recently went out of beta and BlogBridge was released to the wild too.

Given all the competition in the RSS Aggregator market, it's really important for new entrants to differentiate themselves to users or target a particular niche market. Another thing new players should focus on is solving some of the crucial issues in RSS aggregation - for example filtering out duplicate results (when a number of people link to the same thing and it turns up multiple times in your Aggregator).

Techie Post of the Week

Sometimes it helps to step back from the hype, take a deep breath, and get a little perspective. That's how I felt when I read Avi Dronamraju's post called The Aggregation Kool-Aid. In it he cautions that although we should appreciate "the power of aggregation", we need to move beyond that and "solve relevance/matching problems".

I agree. It's time for the next level of RSS Aggregation products and services to step up. We need to find ways to filter out the rubbish from our topic feeds, make it easier for non-geeks to subscribe to feeds, discover better methods for delivering personalized information. All these things and more are still searching for a solution ;-)

- MediaPost: Mainstream Media Warms To 'Web 2.0' (WashingtonPost guy: "We're trying to lengthen the interaction between reader and content." NYTimes calls it a "nexus of content and community")

- BubbleGen on tools and audiences (Umair says WSJ, WaPo, NYT and Economist audiences could give him content of relevance and depth, but they haven't been given the tools to connect and create)

- Can MySpace be Beaten? (great analysis on how MySpace/News Corp has "essentially captured the entirety of Americas youth" (!). Also check out Marc Canter's response, in which he says open standards could be the answer)

- BusinessWeek on social networking systems (thinks niche-oriented networks is the future, because " advertisers may have an easier time reaching such a targeted audience.")

- Here Come the Edge Aggregators! (interesting overview from Pete Cashmore of some of the other 'edge aggregators' out there, apart from edgeio)

- Jason Fried on Web 2.0 thinking ("It’s about value — something the new web set seems afraid to 1. create, and 2. charge for.")

- Union Square Ventures: Web services and devices ("When web services integrate with devices in a open architecture, we believe that the consumers' interest in innovation and integration will trump the vendors' interest in preserving control over limited proprietary channels.")

- Kevin Marks on Internet generations ("My generation draws the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone; the younger generation experiences it as oxygen that supports their digital lives." -- via Susan Mernit)

Flickr pic by berbercarpet

- Read/WriteWeb
- My ZDNet blog
- My Flickr account
- My del.icio.us account
- My 43Things account
- My Allconsuming account

The list could go on, but the point is I (like many others) publish my content in more than a few places. A Microcontent Aggregator brings all that content together in one interface - and feed.

I looked at a number of these people-focused mc aggregators and narrowed it down to 3 that were 'best of breed' - peoplefeeds, Suprglu, and 43Things. I'll profile these and others in a series of posts. My favourite currently is 43Things, because of its functionality and also unlike the other two it has an API.

43Things was built by a Seattle startup called The Robot Coop, formed by some ex-Amazon developers in late 2004. I had the pleasure of meeting them in person while I was in Seattle in January. 43Things has a number of subsites, which to be honest makes it somewhat difficult to navigate around. But the functionality and range of things you can do is top notch. You can publish your goals (43things), track people (43people), enter reviews (allconsuming), list cities (43places), create list of bests (a recent acquisition).

One of the great things about 43Things is that there are RSS feeds for everything. What's more, you can aggregate feeds on your People > Feeds page. For example my aggregator page is: http://ricmac.43people.com/feeds.

As you can see, I can view all my main feeds from the one page. Now to be honest, I don't use it very often - perhaps because I'm more of a 'professional' blogger than a social one. Which would explain why my Flickr account hasn't been updated for a while! But I can definitely see a use for this - and microcontent aggregators in general - for those people who use the Web for social networking and personal blogging. For example I know that a large number of younger people have both MySpace and Facebook accounts - not to mention Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. So a tool like 43Things is a good option to aggregate all those accounts together in one interface and feed (for those who want to subscribe to your activities).

Another plus for 43Things is the ability to filter the aggregate feed. People who have been reading R/WW for a while know that filtering is one of my hot buttons this year. With 43Things you can add and personalize feeds by going to your subscriptions page, e.g.:
http://ricmac.43people.com/subscriptions/add_feed

Robot Coop co-founder Erik Benson wrote a post earlier this year explaining the process:

"Now, some people (like me) probably are a little overzealous about adding content… so there’s a chance that you don’t actually want to see every blurry camera phone picture I post. For cases like this, you can unsubscribe from particular feeds within a person’s set of feeds and still be subscribed to the person as a whole. You do this by clicking on their name in the sidebar and selecting only the content that you want."

The filtering aspect is excellent and proof that 43Things is a forward-thinking app. The one thing that could be improved (imho) is the navigation, to make it easier to use and find your way around. But all in all, if you're looking for a fun and highly functional microcontent aggregator then give 43Things a go. I'll profile the other people-focused mc aggregators in posts to come.

"Do you think there will be any issues for Bloglines in using others content for the purposes of building context for advertising, ie. is that contrary to licenses which state that the content can not be used for commercial purposes?"

I'd like to throw that question out to my readers. What do you think?

"The Read/Write Web blog writes that Lucmo is in "beta" -- that's not correct, we're still in alpha. ;-) Sadly, development has stagnated over the last couple of weeks because of busyness (Guan) and vacation (Simon). However, as soon as the current heatwave is over in Denmark we will be productive again."

I'm looking forward to further developments, because I believe the browser-based model for News Aggregators has a lot going for it. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I signed up to another web-based RSS Aggregator called Bloglines. I used to read my RSS feeds via a desktop app, but now I've switched to Bloglines. Here's why:

1. Bloglines allows me to synch my weblog subscriptions across my work and home computers. My subscriptions and history of what I've read stays the same no matter if I'm logged in from work or home.

2. I didn't have to install anything, or worse, install it twice!

3. I can synch my Bloglines subscriptions with my weblog blogroll, because Blogroll allows me to import my weblog subscriptions in OPML format. Granted this wasn't working when I tried, but I sent Bloglines an email about it and soon after they replied saying it is fixed now. You can also export your subs from Bloglines to your weblog blogroll, but I haven't tried that feature.

4. Bloglines has recently added some new features: blog search, "combined views", time zone configuration, and other nifty Web-based things.

5. There's apparently a way to track how many people in Bloglines subscribe to your weblog, but I haven't figured out how this works yet. The user interface is still being "tweaked", so maybe this feature will become more obvious soon.

I have noticed that Bloglines is very good at publicizing itself, e.g. Bloglines developer Mark Fletcher successfully got Scobleized a few times and now it looks like he'll be in Forbes magazine. Being able to spread the memes is half the battle sometimes.

But even though I'm a Bloglines user, I'm still keen to try out Lucmo when it arrives. Lucmo - with its concept of "collaborative filtering" - sounds like a mix between Bloglines, k-collector and Chandler. The logical next step for RSS Aggregators is to filter and aggregate information based on a user's interests. It's along the lines of topic aggregation that k-collector does and has similarities to the "agent" concept that Chandler is developing.

So good luck Lucmo and keep up the good work Bloglines! As for "smart clients", Robert Scoble has been quiet about these lately and I haven't heard mu]]>Sponsor

I told Vicito to track stories related to "baseball" and this afternoon I compared the results to those from SportsSpyder's MLB page. Not surprisingly, they were both dominated by news about the trade of Johan Santana -- baseball's top pitcher -- to the New York Mets. Somewhat surprisingly, though, I actually found Vicito's news to be more varied. Beyond Satana I was getting stories about Roger Clemens visits the Astros training camp, pitcher Andy Pettitte, and Major Leaue Baseball's umpire background check policy that were nowhere to be found amid the Santana noise (or were buried) on SportsSpyder.

Tracking "yankees" news on Vicito.

A lot of that might have to do with the source list. Vocito right now is drawing from 750 large and mainstream news sources that cover the gamut in terms of topic. SportsSpyder, on the other hand, is drawing from specialized sources that deal exclusively with baseball -- so certainly the overlap and number of reporters covering the same big story will be greater.

But the experience does highlight one major problem with single stream aggregators like these: there is a lot repetition. Because Vicito is just posting a river of news that matches your search query, you end up getting the same story from multiple source. Unlike with meme-style aggregators like Google News or Techmeme (or perhaps, more on topic, Ballbug), which group similar stories, Vicito's stream loses some appeal once you've seen the same story 5 times.

Nat Burke, founder of Vicito, is aware that eventually some sort of filtering will be necessary. "As we continue to grow our source volume, having something to weed out the noise will become essential," he told me. "What eventual form that takes is up in the air at this point."

Even with the noise problem, though, Vicito remains a useful service for getting breaking, topically filtered, news updates over IM. If instant messenger is your preferred method of communication, then you might find some utility in Vicito. Vicito is free to use, with a premium for-pay package that ups the limit on the number of news stories you can receive per update and how often.

Default Subscriptions

One of the more controversial caveats from the Feedburner post was that some of the Aggregators "ship with one or more of our top 10 feeds as a default" and that this may be skewing the data. Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher emphasizes this issue in the Internetnews.com piece. He is quoted as saying "...there's a red herring created by default subscriptions (built into desktop software) that can skew results in ways that don't reflect the real user base."

Now, I'm not so sure that default subs is as big an issue as the some of the browser-based aggregator caveats (more on that in a minute). Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, which was second in Feedburner's list, left this comment on my blog yesterday about the default subs query:

He also notes that users can of course unsubscribe from the default feeds at any time.

We don't know how many people do unsubscribe, but given that NetNewsWire is an aggregator exclusively for the Apple Mac OS X then I'd say a lot of users would not unsubscribe from those two Mac feeds. But the real question, perhaps, is how many of Feedburner's big customers are Mac publications? Brent's mentioned two that may be, but how many others are signed up to Feedburner's service? Mac publications are known to have large and devoted readerships, so it's quite possible Feedburner's data is skewed to a degree towards the most popular Mac aggregators - if there are a number of popular Mac feeds in their data.

Mac users big RSS users?

Another thing. If Mac publications are over-represented in Feedburner's data, then this would account for the interesting fact that the second-place getter in Feedburner's stats is an aggregator that is exclusively for people on the Mac OS platform. The vast majority of computer users are Windows users and NetNewsWire is, as far as I know, not an option for them. So it's quite amazing that an aggregator that only a relatively small percentage of people can use, turns out to be the number 2 aggregator for the whole market - and by a healthy margin too! I suspect it's got something to do with Macs being very popular amongst the sort of geek likely to read RSS feeds. Is NetNewsWire the iPod of RSS Aggregators? :-)

Yahoo and the mainstream users

Quick note on MyYahoo, which may be best positioned among the current crop of aggregators to get mainstream users to subscribe to RSS feeds (simply because that's their user base). It's interesting that Firefox Live Bookmarks places third in the Feedburner stats - and my stats for that matter. Firefox users are generally of the geek persuasion. And Yahoo is a fair way back in 9th place, which seems to me another indication that geeks dominate these stats - i.e. Mac users come second, Firefox third! I mean come on, Macs and Firefox are minority products still and it's mostly geeks who use them. I use them :-)

Bloglines Caveats

Lest I be seen as picking on the desktop aggregators, I should point out what I think are two pretty big caveats for browser-based aggregators (and let's face it, we're mostly talking about Bloglines!). One issue is that the Feedburner count of Bloglines subscribers doesn't take into account abandoned accounts, another is that a lot of desktop aggregator users do not poll for feeds daily (24 hours is the timespan of Feedburner's study). In the first case, Bloglines stats are probably being overstated. In the second case, desktop stats (like NetNewsWire's) are likely being understated. Those are two pretty big caveats in my opinion.

Measuring Value

We've opened up a whole can of worms in this business of analyzing RSS Aggregator market share. But that's a good thing! The RSS world has long needed a way to measure hits and readers. If blogging is to be monetized with advertising and writers getting paid for niche content, then we need ways to measure the stats. How else will advertisers and media companies, and investors for that matter (IPO anyone?) know how to value RSS-based companies and RSS producers?

So that's why I'm so enamoured of Feedburner - I think they've opened up the market for RSS measurement and are leading the way for us all. Interestingly, Feedburner threw out a broad hint that they're about to release a service that will solve some of these stats caveats:

Summary

I've only scratched the surface of the many issues surrounding the RSS aggregator market share data that has been released by Feedburner. But that's OK, because it means I get to keep digging into and analyzing the data! Now, Feedburner: about those stats minus the top 10 feeds... how about giving those to us? ;-)