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Guesstimating the size of an RSS feed audience is always a huge shot in the dark, but sometimes I get curious about how many people subscribe to this silly blog. If I was willing to surrender my feeds to Feedburner, I could get some pretty detailed stats. But, I don’t want to hand over that.

So, I thought about digging into the accesslog that’s stored in Drupal’s database. I’ve set my copy to store access logs for the past 2 weeks, and it dutifully records which pages are viewed, as well as the IP address the request came from. It’s just a subset of a typical webserver log, so there isn’t any privacy issue here (if you’re really worried about being tracked online, you’re already using an anonymizing proxy…)

A quick MySQL poke-and-test session, and I came up with a quick query that spits out a WAG about the number of feed subscribers. It’s not accurate, because people might be accessing the feed from multiple locations (recording different IP addresses), and services like Bloglines might be sending many readers in under the cover of a single IP address (at the moment, Bloglines claims 334 folks are subscribing to various feeds published by this blog). Also, it makes no distinction between bots (Google and friends) and actual human-proxying-agents. Whatever.

Here’s my brain-dead-simple query. It just looks for all requests for feed-related paths, and counts up the number of unique IP addresses.

select count(distinct hostname) from accesslog where path like '%/feed%'

YMMV. IANAP. YHBH. Wait. Not the last one.

According to my Drupal log, there have been 955 unique IP addresses requesting the RSS/atom feeds on this blog in the last 2 weeks. That may be higher or lower than the number of actual humans reading the blog. Still, ballpark order-of-magnitude WAG at roughly 1,000. That kind of boggles my mind.

Update: Oops. My rudimentary query forgot subscribers of “rss.xml” - which turned out to be more than the various /feed subscribers! Also, thanks to a tip from Bér Kessels, I added the cool XStatistics module, which takes care of the guesswork. According to it, there are 2062 subscribers to the various feeds on this blog. Wow.

BlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn’t feel like a Java app - it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.

It’s also got support for notifications - using Growl on MacOSX and whatevertheheck Windows uses on that side of the fence. Handy. Now… If only they’d get that open-link-in-background-browser-window thing working, so my browser wouldn’t pop to the front every time I open a link…

I totally recommend BlogBridge to anyone looking for a way to easily/effectively manage a LOT of RSS feeds. I’d simply drown under my subscriptions without things like star ratings and smart feeds. And the built-in OPML/reading-list feature is simply killer.

They’ve released regular installer versions for MacOSX and Windows, as well as versions for Linux and Java WebStart (if you use the WebStart version, it can auto-update for you).

If you’ve already used BlogBridge, be sure to sync all of your guides with the (free) BlogBridge service before upgrading, as they’ve optimized the local database file format, which may blow away your previous database. Syncing seems quite bulletproof, so it’s a good habit to get into anyway…

I’m toying with the idea of doing a screencast to show just how quickly I can check all of my feeds. I can seriously check all 400+ feeds in about 10 minutes (or less).

I’ve been struggling with how to best manage the constant flow of non-critical information that flows around me. RSS feeds. Email. Technorati references. Podcasts. The list goes on. I am going to try an experiment for a couple of weeks, prompted by a reinstall of the OS on my Powerbook.

Yesterday, before leaving the office, I fired up Software Update to grab the latest 10.4.6 update on both my desktop and ‘book. Came in this morning to find the G5 ready to go, but the Powerbook was sitting with an “Installer failed” type of message. I rebooted both, but the ‘book wouldn’t come back. So, I nuked it and reinstalled after wiping the drive.

I’m taking this opportunity to rework how I do things. I’m leaving my RSS client Blogbridge over on the desktop machine. No RSS at home, or on the weekends. I think that will make it easier, since 99+% of the stuff that comes in via RSS really can wait until Monday AM, and it doesn’t need to steal time from the family.

The Powerbook will have the Developer tools (XCode, Subversion, etc…) as well as email and iChat (and browsers, of course) but no RSS. I’ll see how that goes.

Also, Blogbridge runs WAAAY faster on the quad G5 than on the aging Powerbook.

The BlogBridge folks rolled out a cool update to their RSS reader. The biggest addition is a very handy search tool, strongly inspired by Spotlight. Here’s a sample of a quick search to find any posts in any of my feeds which have been published since yesterday, and contain the word “podcasting”:

Now that’s just plain cool. It was technically possible by creating SmartFeeds in previous versions, but that was a clunky process that wasn’t well suited to ad-hoc on-the-fly searches. They’ve been working on some UI refinements to remove or rethink or hide the geekier things, which is a good thing.

I’d actually tried to switch back to NetNewsWire (with the latest beta release last week) and lasted about 2 days. They’re getting closer, in that they’re trying to do stuff with “attention”, and have syncing with the NewsGator service, but it’s just not to the level that BlogBridge has it. I can chew through my feeds soooo much faster in BlogBridge than any other reader I’ve tried - and I’ve tried a LOT of readers.

The one thing that NNW does much better than BlogBridge is the ability to load pages in a browser in the background. BlogBridge insists on bringing the browser to the front, so every link clicked to view a post in my browser must be followed immediately with a command+tab to get back to BlogBridge so I can keep plowing through unread items. It’s a pretty minor nit, though.

It’s a really good upgrade to BlogBridge. I had a minor issue where it wasn’t happy with my database files or something, but nuking that and restoring from my copy on the BlogBridge server solved that.

I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.

Brian’s students have been off to a great start in their AggRSSive project - and they have plans to make it even more kick-ass. Tyler’s described plans were pretty much spot-on to what is needed. Not complete, but a darned good start. Can’t wait to get my hands on that…

At Northern Voice, someone from a genetic engineering organization (didn’t catch the name of the guy or the agency - I was sure it was Genentech, but others were sure it wasn’t) was describing a mind-blowing RSS-based workflow that he’s using to tie research, automated lab results, individual publishing, and lots of other sources together into one interface. They have some AI ninjas crunching everything to make sure it gets to where it needs to go, and to start making connections between stuff. He mentioned that as a result of this AI-based aggregation, they were able to make a completely new discovery that linked two previously unrelated topics (proteomics and something else…) Very cool stuff. We should see if they can give a tour, and if they’d be willing to share with the rest of the class.

In the meantime, I just took a quick romp through SourceForge to see what else has been done in the area. Not a lot, unfortunately. But, I did come across a rather cool server-side aggregator that I hadn’t heard of before. sux0r appears initially to behave like others (Feed on Feeds, etc…) but - it doesn’t have categories. Well, it does, but not in the traditional sense. You create a set of tags, and then proceed to flag aggregated posts as belonging to any of these tags. After a while, the bayesian magic has enough to chew on, and it begins to automatically tag incoming posts. Latent semantic analysis to apply folksonomies?

Anyway, although the concept is cool, and will form an important part of EduGlu, the current incarnation in sux0r won’t scale to thousands of feeds in thousands of categories, over dozens of years.

OK. Enough thinking about this stuff for now. Back to work…

I just updated my copy of Blogbridge to the latest weekly (2.12) and in this version they threw the switch on OPML publishing of folders/guides of feeds. I took a couple of minutes to gather my education-related subscriptions into one guide, and tried publishing it as OPML.

D’Arcy’s Wild and Wacky Edublogs Reading List

It contains 102115 feeds of edubloggy goodness. There are some stale feeds that I just can’t bring myself to delete (you know, in case they ever post something). If you’re using an aggregator that groks live OPML feeds, just subscribe to the URL. If you’re using anything else, you may need to download the OPML and manually import it.

No guarantees that I’ll keep the list up to date, but it’s easy enough to do that it shouldn’t be a problem (unlike the iPodder.org educational directory, which is a tedious pain in the ass to maintain - which is why I’ve neglected it for months)

I’ve been using Blogbridge for awhile, but I didn’t truly appreciate it until I tried to switch to another RSS reader. After I left, I realized I was spending much more time reading my feeds than I was when I was using Blogbridge. After switching back to it, it’s like coming home. I’m blasting through my feeds quickly, and “checking in” isn’t an onerous process anymore.

So, what makes Blogbridge better? How am I more efficient using Blogbridge than the other reader apps? Let me count the ways:

1. “Starz”. I can mark feeds as having a 0-5 star rating, and then I can build “Smart Feeds” that list items from all feeds (or a subset of feeds) that are within a range of Starz ratings.
2. Smart Feeds - most other reader apps have these now, but these really shine when combined with Starz. I’m so totally addicted to this method of filtering content - I’ve had iTunes doing the same thing for a couple of years now.
3. “River of News” - David Winer appears to think he’s invented something called a River of News. It’s just a view of a feed (or set of feeds, or a set of items from various feeds) that displays every item together as if in a single flow of info. A river, if you will. Clever. (btw, Drupal 4.7’s “Organic Groups” module has an option called ‘River of News” for group content display… I’m just saying…) But, Blogbridge goes one step further, because you can easily toggle the amount of info presented in a River. There are three views - just the titles, titles + short excerpt, titles + entire content (that’s where I live). It makes it VERY easy to scroll through 200 items quickly, scanning the River as it passes through my screen.
4. Integrated with del.icio.us. Most of the time, the only reason I open a post in my browser is to then add it to del.icio.us so I can find it later (or from another machine). Blogbridge lets me do that right from the River view. Now, the only posts I have to open in my browser are photos from Flickr that I want to mark as Faves.
5. Reading lists. I can subscribe to an OPML file containing a set of feeds, and Blogbridge will ingest it and subscribe me to the feeds. It will also monitor the OPML file, and add new feeds as they are added, and ask me if I want to delete feeds that are removed from the file. A future version of Blogbridge will also let me publish sets of feeds as guides, making it really easy to share sets of resources.

So, in less time than it used to take me to “check in” on my RSS feeds, I’ve read my email, read all of my RSS feeds (exept for the Flickr feeds - that can wait), and written this blog post. Now, there’s still a few minutes to get ready for a morning of meetings…

Here’s a screenshot of my Blogbridge setup. I’ll annotate the version in Flickr to describe what bits are for.

After I wrote some thoughts about what I’m looking for in an RSS reader, I realized that the only application that comes close to what I was describing is BlogBridge. It has prioritization of feeds and items via “Starz”, and ties into social services (both a custom network for sharing keywords and ratings, and a direct connection to my del.ico.us account).

It’s got some room for improvement - my biggest beefs are resource hogging and the seeming inability of java apps to open URLs in a browser without bringing it to the front. But they aren’t fatal flaws - only annoying.

I took another quick look at Shrook, and while I like many things about it (the paned UI that pans out of the way as you drill down) it just doesn’t offer the innovative coolness that BlogBridge is working on…

I’ve been giving some thought to my ever-growing collection of RSS feeds (now up to 498 subscriptions) and realized that I don’t “read” many of them. The majority of the feeds (half? two thirds? more?) are merely scanned.

Why scan so many feeds? To me, it’s about patterns. Keeping my peripheral vision (peripheral mind? is there such a thing?) pouring over more information than I could ever consciously absorb. And being able to pick up on subtle variations in the attention of the flock that I am a part of, as well as other related flocks.

Many of the feeds are used to keep up on the status of people, projects, and events. Things that don’t fit very cleanly into the River of News metaphor. What would be more appropriate for that kind of information would be more of a dashboard at-a-glance interface, like Flickr’s “Contacts’” pages. Or Google News. Something that keeps “status” items fresh and ready, without being interlaced in the content I need to be more actively engaged with.

The River of News can be a bit misapplied. Even with sorting/filtering capabilities ( something that BlogBridge does very well ) it’s still the wrong interface to meaningfully present many kinds of information. Photos are better in an album (again, something BB does very well). Events are happiest in a calendar, etc.

When all types and priorities of content are dropped into a blender and squirted out in simple chronological order, it gets very difficult to separate signal from noise. Simply shunting everything into folders or directories doesn’t help either - all that does is temporarily decrease the size of the flock being observed, while adding a corresponding increase in effort to get to that group (you have to navigate to the group’s folder).

I’m guessing a more effective approach would be to provide multiple interfaces, each displaying the most appropriate types of information. And, ideally, some kind of 50,000′ aggregate view to show group flocking behaviours - memes, linking, trajectory shifts, etc. And it has to be fast, responsive and relatively resource friendly because I’d be practically living in this space.

And, most people are consuming their content in isolation. BB has the foundations for making it a shared or even social experience - letting users publish sets of feeds (attention?), and to share ratings and tags for feeds and items. How can we more effectively leverage the intelligence of the hive, rather than making each bee try to make

In yet another flip-flop in my preferences for primary applications, I just switched to Vienna 2 as my RSS/Feed aggregator. It’s basically an Open Source clone of NetNewsWire. NNW kinda turned sour for me when it was bought out and the .Mac etc… features got tossed in the trash can.

Vienna is a nice app - it’s a native Cocoa app, so it runs spanky fast. It uses the SQL Lite database, so it’s pretty speedy - and there’s a chance I could write something to do something useful with the database if I really wanted to.

I’ve been using Blogbridge for the last couple of months, and it’s a really nice app. I just got tired of command+tabbing back to it after hitting a link, and having my RAM sucked up by Java’s greediness.

Things I prefer in Vienna over Blogbridge:

• Performance - despite the claims of awesome performance for a Java app, BB was always just a little slow, and sucked up terabytes of RAM. Well, not quite terabytes, but an unholy proportion of my system’s available resources went to sustaining BB.
• Pages sent to the browser actually open in the background as they should. Man, it’s annoying having to command+Tab after hitting a link every. single. time.
• Searching. BB doesn’t have a search tool. WTF? That’s kinda the point of having a local database of posts, no?

Things I’ll miss about Blogbridge:

• Feed suggestions - found LOTS of great new feeds using that feature, which spiders my current feeds and their posts to find relevant links that I’m not subscribed to.
• Starz. Much more granular to be able to apply a 0-5 star rating to a feed or post, rather than just marking as flagged.
• Star ratings on feeds. I really like having posts ranked higher based on the priority I’ve given to the source. Wonder if that’s possible to reproduce using some kind of smart feed in Vienna…
• Flickr feed handling - rather than just displaying these feeds as straight RSS subscriptions, it presented a form of photo album view. Very cool.
• The combined view, showing full posts of all feeds in one place, rather than having to cycle through individual posts. It’ll just take some getting used to - might be more efficient with separate post view anyway.

My switching to Vienna isn’t a mark against Blogbridge at all - it’s great software, and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a reader. It’s also not a permanent switch - I’m apparently pretty non-commital when it comes to software, since I just have to keep going and trying the shiny new toys as I come across them. I’ll be keeping my eye on Blogbridge, since they’ve got a lot of cool ideas in the works.

In a further flip-flop, I’m trying Firefox yet again, after being forced to do so after my WordPress 2.0 upgrade exposed a funky cookie-related bug that makes Safari kinda unusable for me (oddly, since it’s working fine for King in his new WP installation…).

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