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As eBooks have become increasingly popular, many major eBookstores have created ways to fill those eBookshelves not just with the titles of well known authors but with the works of any author willing to cough up the fees to have their projects published and distributed in this new format. And today, Borders throws its hat into the ring with a partnership with the Boulder-based startup BookBrewer, offering a service that will let independent authors publish and sell their eBooks via the Borders' eBookstore.

We have written quite a lot about the decline of the startpage and the dismal state of RSS readers. No matter the state of these two markets, Genieo manages to combine these two with a sophisticated recommendation engine to bring you a personalized startpage based on the sites you visit throughout the day. As you surf the web, Genieo constantly learns about the topics you are interested in and automatically subscribes to the feeds of those sites you visit regularly. Thanks to its sophisticated recommendation engine, the service can then determine which stories to show you on its startpage.

If you like to get immediate notifications when a story hits the wire you are not alone. What if you could schedule your notifications a few times a day. If only there was a way to use push notifications on your iPhone and have them appear on your desktops too.

Using some of the new notification services available this is possible. Let's take a look at one way to do it.

RSS is not dead. But Bloglines, one of the most venerable web-based RSS readers, is about to close shop next month. According to a report on TechCrunch, Bloglines' parent company IAC will make an official announcement later today and shut the service down on October 1. In the early days of RSS, Bloglines was the go-to feed reader for early adopters. Over the last few years, however, the company struggled to innovate and hold on to its users.

Using algorithms to give personalized recommendations is hard. A lot of online services try to leverage their users' social graphs to determine the stories, books, songs or movies that are potentially of interest to them. Given that your own interests can be quite different from those of your friends, though, these systems are often limited. my6sense, on the other hand builds a personalized and constantly evolving profile for all of its users and provides recommendations purely based on what its algorithm thinks is most likely to be interesting to you. Starting today, Android users will be able to find the most interesting items in their RSS, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz feeds with the help of My6Sense.

Facebook has confirmed that it is testing a new feature that will allow any user to subscribe to notifications of another user's activities through the same interface that new comments and accepted friend requests appear in now.

The feature was first reported on by the watch-dog blog AllFacebook. This feature is going to be a big deal. It will facilitate greater interaction between a user and people of interest by placing updates about those peoples' activities in the highest-priority place in the Facebook interface, the inbox with the strongest signal-to-noise ratio by far.

Windows Phone 7 will be available in time for the Holiday Season, Microsoft says, and today the company unveiled a beautiful new RSS reading app built by an award winning team of Microsoft 2010 interns.

Called Headliner, the app adheres to the design standards of the rest of the OS (delightfully attractive, for Microsoft) and includes most of the features that mobile RSS users will want. See the demo video below and marvel at the slick UI, the clean display of feed items and the social media integration. Then tell us what you think it's still missing. I can only think of one or two things, really.

Twitter has just launched its first official iPad application, and the reviews so far have been glowing. The new app offers a few notable features, such as panes for interacting with content within a stream, media which displays inline without slowing you down and gesture support for common Twitter actions.

What stands out the most about this new application is not a summary of its features, however. It's how the app fits into this growing trend that positions the iPad as the go-to device for consuming streams. With its touchscreen interface, the Apple tablet is ideal for both viewing and interacting with flows of information - not just tweets, but also Facebook status updates, news, RSS feeds, photos and more.

Adobe today announced it has reached a deal to acquire ECM vendor Day Software. In a telephone interview, Erik Larson Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe, cited Day's technology's scalability and social features and the company's support for open-source software as the primary factors driving the acquisition. According to Day's website, "Day Chief Scientist Roy Fielding was co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, author of the Apache Software license, and creator of the Apache web server." Day has contributed to 12 Apache projects and 25 other open-source projects.

Social magazine app Flipboard fulfills the promise of the iPad. It pulls down a real-time stream of social data from the cloud and delivers it to users in a bright, personalized, touch-screen interface. The app takes messages and links shared by your friends and other groups on Facebook and Twitter, assembles them as multi-media excerpts with whitespace on touch flippable pages and adds a variety of other social features. It's not a new idea but it's a very big deal.

Launched with high-profile investor backing and an explosion of media coverage, the free app is struggling to perform under a big load of user interest. None the less, it's immediately clear that the promises of syndicated content, social news and a touch interface for real-time information are more real today than they were yesterday.