Beta Blogliners,

We launched a new skin for Beta.bloglines.com. The revised skin comes after much review by Blogliners (Bloglinites?) who have been keeping us posted on their likes and dislikes of the redesign. Here’s a quick peek:

We’ve also launched display advertising in search results and an ad unit on the Classic Start Page. We’re in the process of developing monetization methods ($$) which work within a feed reader. We look forward to listening to Blogliners and working with 3rd parties to develop the next generation blog and feed networks. You’ll see more of the redesign soon.

Enjoy!

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

More and more of our feeds have embedded video, so it was a no-brainer to offer greater video support. We've cleared over 30 different video sites to stream video through Bloglines. It's a broad list including Blip.tv, Break.com, Brightcove, Cnet, CNN, CollegeHumor.com, Dailymotion.com, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Videoegg, and oh yeah, YouTube, among others.

Here's an example where I'm about to watch Jake and Amir of College Humor. The video is embedded in the Silicon Alley Insider feed inside using the Vimeo player.

Have Fun!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Heather goes onto write about the differences between the user bases.

• Bloglines users are also more inclined toward Photography websites, while Google Reader users are more inclined to visit Television websites.
• ...Bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (Shopping & Classifieds) website.

It would be interesting to hear from Blogliners on your blogs to see if you really do track more photography websites. We launched a Flickr feed module in Bloglines Beta for our photography enthusiasts. We hope you liked the feature and also like Bloglines Beta.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

We've deployed all the features mentioned in the previous blog post. Here's a recap:

Search

Blog search is finally in Beta, and we've incorporated some popular Ask 3D features. For example, related searches are displayed in the right-hand column next to results. All of classic's features are still there, but with newer styling.

Flickr View

Selecting a Flickr feed and viewing it in quick view now uses the Flickr API to show images at their maximum resolution.

Add Page

Beta's old add page was spartan, to say the least. The new Add page has package tracking, weather feeds, and a new feature: Packs. You can now add popular categories of feeds with a single mouse click.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

We’ve been a little quiet of late, mostly because we’re busy working on our next release. We still have a bit of QA to do, but we’d like to share some details.

Search

As you can see, we’re actively integrating blog search into beta.bloglines.com. We’ve incorporated some Ask 3D's popular features into Bloglines blog search. For example, related searches in the right-hand column in the screenshot below. In case you’re wondering, we’ve retained the filtering allowing you to search based on feed subscriber popularity. You also might notice an advertisement on that mockup. Keep an eye-out for CPC oriented ads in future releases.

Flickr View

We continue to expand our views for photo-feeds with a new preview mode for Flickr photo-feeds.

Add Feeds

Many of you noticed that Beta's add page was pretty basic. Essentially, it was a stub for future development. We’ve finished off the next iteration on the page, so you can easily track packages, monitor weather, or see recommended packs.

Blogliners, we're here working for you. Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

The great thing about feeds is that there is a selection for any topic, so this time celebrate Valentine’s Day year round. Here are some feeds of interest:

• Love Quote of the Day (Subscribe) - A daily missive on the spirit of love.
• iVillage - Love Advice for Singles and Couples (Subscribe) - A wide spectrum of timely advice on all things love.
• Ask Men - Dating & Love (Subscribe) - A variety of tips and techniques from a particularly male point of view.

While cynics might insist the greeting card industry created Valentine’s Day, romance is always of interest. We would love to hear your stories of how you use Bloglines to improve your love-life.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman & the Bloglines Team

At Bloglines, we experiment with feeds all the time. We wanted to point out 3 easy ways you can keep in touch with your friends on Facebook, Flickr and Upcoming.org via Bloglines.

Facebook
Need to have your Facebook Friends' Status Updates at all times? You can import your Status Update feed into your Bloglines account. Here's how you can get your Status Updates in Bloglines. Go to your home page. Look for your "Status Updates" section on the right side of the page near your photo. Click on "See All" and go to your Status Updates Page. On the right side of the page, you'll see a blue RSS Icon under the header "Subscribe."

Flickr
Get a photo feed from a friend, family member or other Flickr-ino. Enter the user name in the Flickr Search. Look at the bottom of the user's profile page. Look way to the bottom and you'll find an RSS icon. Subscribe to it like any other feed.

Upcoming.org
See what events your friends aretracking. Be sure to sign-in to Upcoming.org. Look for the area on your home page with the title, "My Friends' Events." (Be sure to have added friends before-hand.) Click on the link "My Friends' Events." Look for the RSS subscribe button in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

Keep us posted on other ways you use Bloglines. If you do post on your blog, be sure to send us an email, so we can highlight your post for other Blogliners.

Enjoy!

Here's a little before and after.

Before

After

As a reminder, you can go to Flickr or other photos sites and create a feed tracking a specific topic or tag. In the example above our topic we tracked was "Europe." Or you can track a specific user on the site. So in other words, anytime a friend posts a picture on Flickr, you would see that picture on your Bloglines.

Have Fun!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

One of the problems with a feed reader is that you can't see the blog in its full glory. We've solved that problem in Bloglines Beta. We've created a setting in 3-Pane View which allows you to get all of that bloggy goodness in your feed reader. Plus, you can get easy access to the comments, other features or, heck, even click on an ad to help you favorite blogger. This is great for highly designed blogs that cover knitting, design, art or funny pictures of cats.Here's how you get access to the feature. Go to 3-Pane View. Click on a headline. Look for the Preview or RSS buttons to toggle between Feed View and Blog View (see below).

You can see the differences below with a feed from one of our favorite blogs, icanhascheezeburger.

Feed View

Blog View

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and The Bloglines Team

We've been busy working on Bloglines Beta to provide some stocking stuffers for everyone during this holiday season. Tonight we rolled out Saved. Later in the week, we'll talk about a couple of other features: Flickr Widget and Blog Preview.

Just as it sounds, this features allows you to save a post for future reference. Many of our Blogliners are active filers who like to save their favorite posts. It's very easy. Let me walk you through the feature.

You'll notice at the bottom of an article a new "Save" button located in-between "Pin" and "Email."

Clicking on the "Save" button creates a new inline window where you can add a comment and save the post to a specific folder.

To get to your saved articles, click on the "Saved" button in the left-hand corner of your screen. Simple!

You might ask, "Why have "Pin" and "Save"?" Sometimes you want article "Pinned" in your reading flow so you're forced to look at it again to really absorb the complexity of the post. Other times, you want to file away those posts that stand the test of time. That might sound very nuanced, but remember if you're reading 1,000 articles a day, like Blogliners, you develop several different reading modes.

BTW - For people using Bloglines Classic, we've migrated your old "Clippings" into "Saved."

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and The Bloglines Team

Source: Wools, License

Tomorrow evening, we will be implementing network upgrades in our data center. The scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 12/11 from 9:00 PM PST to 11:00 PM PST. During this time, Bloglines will not be available.

- Eric Engleman & The Bloglines Team

Last week, I met a big name blogger who is also a dedicated user of Bloglines. I couldn't help but notice his iPhone typing skills. He was clearly pounding out at 40 words per minute which is super-fast on the iPhone. I was really excited to hear his impressions on iBloglines, our iPhone optimized version of Bloglines. Unfortunately, he hadn't heard of iBloglines. I was crestfallen. I realized I needed to do a better job telling Blogliners about our great products.

No better time than the present to remind everyone of the great Bloglines mobile products. We have 2 major product sets: iBloglines for iPhones and Bloglines for mobile phones.

iBloglines for iPhones - located at i.bloglines.com

	Pin - Save the story for when you get back to your Mac or PC.
	Email Articles - Sharing is fun.
	Search - Find the latest buzz with our blog and feed search.
	Auto Refresh of "My Library" - No need to hit refresh to get the latest updates.
	Hide Images - We know EDGE is slow, and your time is valuable.
	Preferences - Personalizing is essential. Our Blogliners love to personalize their experience so they can optimize their feed reading flow.

Bloglines for Mobile - located at m.bloglines.com and m.beta.bloglines.com

Why two different versions of Bloglines for mobile phones? One is Bloglines Classic (m.bloglines.com) which has been around for years. The other is our new beta product (m.beta.bloglines.com) which has the latest set of enhancements.

Bloglines has had a leading mobile feed reader for the last couple of years. It's always been one of our key product strengths. So we were really excited to make our mobile product even better. We were busy over the summer re-writing the mobile code from the ground up. A new version of mobile is available as part of the Bloglines Beta Releases. Go to m.beta.bloglines.com on your cell phone. When we feel it's ready, we'll make it available on Bloglines Classic. Key Features

• Start Page - Your Bloglines Start Page is displayed at the top of the screen. This way you can pull your favorite feeds to the top.
• Pin (formerly known as Keep New) - Sometimes you want to save that special post to read later when you're not on the go.
• Pagination - Instead of loading all of your posts, we parse out the posts into smaller bundles to fit into the memory constraints of cell phone browser. This has numerous benefits including improved speed, better reliability and safer "mark read" behavior.

Enjoy

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Source: Wools, License

This evening, the Bloglines Plumber and Team will be implementing network upgrades in our data center. The scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 11/27 from 8:00 PM PST to 10:00 PM PST. During this time, Bloglines will not be available.

- The Plumber and The Bloglines Team

Over the weekend, a few individuals, including some of us who work on Bloglines, reported receiving Spam from Bloglines. It was a surprise for us and the few other Blogliners who also received the emails. While the total number of emails sent appear to be small less than 1,000, we think it’s serious enough to address because the spammer impersonated official Bloglines correspondence.

The Event

Emails were sent recommending several posts on a Chinese Blog via the “send a post to a friend” feature on Bloglines. The email ended with a signature from “The Bloglines Team.” The emails were not sent by anyone associated with the Bloglines Team.

The Actions Taken

We monitored our logs and suspended the spammer’s IP address restricting their usage of Bloglines. In addition, on Monday 11/19/07, we briefly shut down the “send email” feature on Bloglines to further monitor the situation.

FYI

Bloglines sends out email to our subscribers for purposes specific to operating Bloglines (registration verification, change password, change of terms of service and other policies, significant product announcements, etc) Most product announcements can be found on the Bloglines News Feed. We take your privacy carefully and will protect our customers from spam.

Take Care.

-Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Blogliners, we’re looking to meet you face-to-face for some quality time to discuss how you use a feed reader. We’re looking to meet people who are new to feeds and feed readers. We’ve met a lot of people over the past few months at conferences, the forums on the web, etc. And we love meeting our power users, but now we need to find some users who are new feeds and feed readers.

Here are some key questions to determine if your right for our customer research:

• New to feeds and Bloglines in the past year.
• Consider yourself a non-techie.
• Willing to do some “homework” about 10 minutes a day for a few days.
• Have broadband.
• Live in the Bay Area - a must.
• Willing to meet with our researcher for 90 minutes during the week of 11/29 to 12/7.

Modest compensation will be provided for you time.

Since we know that Bloglines attracts a wide set of people, we want to get a good mix - all ages, home or work users. So we’ve created a short (5 minute) survey to help us find the folks who best represent the Bloglines audience. In turn, we’ll contact you to arrange a meeting with our researcher. If you’re interested, please check out the survey.

Thanks so much!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team