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Kathleen sent me an email this morning regarding some kudos she wanted to share with the team over here about a recent experience she had with our tool. With her permission of course, I felt I should share some of the snippets with all of you as well…

This morning Steve Bayle and I were working on setting up a demo blog for a local technology agency that has 7,000 members.  We brainstormed some ideas for components and rss “radars” for the blog which will act as the portal to the community.  Steve, who is not yet totally familiar with the back-end of Blogware, was concerned that it was going to take us hours of programming to add all of these new ideas into the blog.  I took care of it in less than an hour and added photo albums, RSS feed headlines, and a few custom components like advanced search (which searches all of the blogs in an opml list) that we have built for our customers.  

Blogware is really beautifully engineered to handle this kind of application.  It’s hierarchical structure where you can create custom components and then build these components into profiles within user groups is really well designed and engineered.  It means simplicity, flexibility, and convenience for us in building blogging communities.  You guys have done a great job on this.

We also really like some of the new components like expanded search and the RSS aggregators.  They offer a lot of power and are very simple and easy to set up.

So thanks for all of the great work you’ve done.

Thanks Kathleen, watching you and your team innovate and create compelling solutions with Blogware provides us with more satisfaction than you could ever imagine.

I wanted to know if all of you could do me a huge favor. A fellow Blogware blogger has one of the best blogs I have ever read dedicated to the formerly antiquated and thanks to Podcasting currently resurgent radio industry. Tod and his I love radio blog have been nominated as a finalist for Best Media Blog at the 2005 Business Blogging awards.

When I voted last week Tod was in the lead, but he is competing against a juggernaught of a Blog created by Fast Company. Due to their volume of visitors to their website all they had to do in response was post a link on their homepage and they have now taken the lead. Do the right thing and help out a fellow Blogware user by voting for I Love Radio! You can find out the instructions on how to do so on Tod's blog here.

I found this on Ross' blog:

“But there’s another gem in Bob’s note. He reasons that if they’ve managed to index 8 million weblogs in one year, that the total universe of weblogs must vastly exceed the universe of 10 million that seems to have emanated first from the Perseus weblog survey.”

According to Bob Wyman, Pubsub is not only tracking 8+ million (Make that 8.5+ million, thanks for the correction Bob! Up to date numbers can be found here) blogs actively, but based on the fact they don't track multilingual all that well added to the explosive popularity of the tool in many multilingual markets, this number could actually exceed 16-24 million worldwide.

A few minor bits of data that have come out in the last little while where nothing is necessarily that bloggable individually, but when combined together….well, you can draw your own conclusions:

LA Times launches desktop RSS reader

Guardian Newspaper launches RSS reader

Cnet launches browser based RSS reader

MSNBC launches “Blog This” button on news stories

French Newspaper Le Monde starts offering Blogs to readers

Hmmm, what do you think?

I'm very late to the game on this one, but noteworthy for the implications alone is the Ask Jeeves acquisition of  Bloglines.

CIO Today

“The short-term gain is that Ask Jeeves improves its search service,” said Daniel Read, vice president for products at Ask Jeeves. “The long-term gain is that a large number of people will be consuming information through blogs and RSS technologies,” he told NewsFactor.

So why? Well RSS search and categorization is a direct competitor to web based searches for content, which has been the only real option available until this new format emerged. As RSS readers and associated tools develop better search functionality such as what the work on Feedmesh could bring around, there will be less of a need for traditional HTML searches through search engines and browsers, especially if Blog content continues it's ramp up the continuim of choice for content consumers.

This goes down a path where you will see a line blurring between Blog search engines and the traditional players. RSS is an evolution to the Internet, and as stated in the CIO article, I agree with the fact that this is probably the first time in my 10+ year history of working in the Internet industry that there is a visible long-term nature to where we can expect the Internet to go, and it's looking great so far. Definitely a positive move from my perspective for everyone.

It's official, an epic struggle has taken place over the weekend, and my adversary was armed to the teeth and extremely dangerous.

After 4 days of constant conflict, the victor has been decided and the battle goes to Peter, but there were casualties… about 5 pounds of body weight, 4 lost days, and delays to a couple of posts I have wanted to make since the Blogosphere has been such a busy place in my absense.

Today is a celebration of triumph and the much needed catch-up on my blog…