Dave Winer has been thinking about, and recently writing about, a new idea: Reading Lists.

OPML is a really useful file structure that just about everyone who uses a feed aggregator, like bloglines, is already using without necessarily knowing it. Most readers keep subscribed feeds for a user in OPML format, for easy importing and exporting. If you export your OPML feed you get a XML file of your feeds, which other feed readers understand.

The problem with opml files from readers is that they are static, meaning I can give you my OPML file but you will never know if I add or delete feeds unless I tell you and give you the new file. All you get is a snapshot of my feeds from the moment that I share my file with you.

Dave thinks these files should be dynamic, which means that I can share my opml file, or as he calls it my reading list, and anyone who subscribes to it will always have the current version, no matter how often I amend that list.

There is very little technology needed to allow this to happen – the various feed readers simply need to agree to support dynamic lists and allow people to share them permanently. Dave’s trying to make this happen.

If he succeeds, we’ll all be able to subscribe to reading lists from people we trust on a given subject, and good feeds will be that much easier to find.

Fred Oliveira wrote about this recently as well. In a comment, Eric Lin writes:

i could easily see this not only as a way to share my reading list with others i know, but also to be matched with others i don’t know with common interests. what if the system could match me with other people who have similar tech, music or lifestyle feeds as i do. it would be a fantastic way to make new connections as well as strengthen existing ones, and i could see communities forming around overlapping feeds. these communities might be stronger than those that form around a single website because they’d have more in common.

Yeah, exactly. As soon as people start to think about this idea, a lot of other interesting ideas start to spring up.

A real world example of where we need this is our Web2.0WorkGroup. Feeds for each blog are linked, and we have a static OPML file that we are updating as new feeds join. However, because the file is static, anyone who downloads the file has to check back frequently as new feeds are added. Let’s automate this process.

Company: PreviewSeek
Launched: August 2005
Status: Angel Funding
Location: London, UK

PreviewSeek is a new London-based search engine created by Chris Hong that is very quietly impressing people with a number of innovating features.

Basic search results are great but nothing to get overly excited about. The useful features include disambiguation of queries (are you searching for “apple” the fruit, or “apple” the computer”?), preview of search pages (think Browster), and better refining of searches.

Understanding Your Query

PreviewSeek does a good job at attempting to determine meaning from a query. Type in “Java” and you get a result set with a numer of options for the query, including the island, the programming language, and even the coffee.

Preview Results

This is my favorite feature. PreviewSeek allows you to preview search results in much the same way as Browster (our profile), except without the download and the ads. It’s a great way quickly scan results without actually clicking away from previewseek.

Search Refinement

For any given query PreviewSeek will suggest a number of refinement options on the left sidebar, which greatly assist in drilling down on a particular search.

Company: Sphere
Launched: Private Beta Launch this Weekend
Status: Funded by Doug MacKenzie, Kevin Compton, Phil Black, Will Hearst, David Mahoney, Vince Vannelli and Mike Winton
Previous Post: October 8, 2005
Location: Palo Alto

I met with Tony Conrad, one of the founders of Sphere, today at our office (ok, its a house, but it’s also an office – just ask the IRS). Sphere is a new blog search engine that quite frankly blows everything, and I mean everything, I’ve seen out of the water in terms of relevance (and, by the way, design…Adaptive Path was involved).

The timing for this meeting was perfect – right on the heels of Yahoo’s new blog search engine, and Robert Scobles already-classic post “The race to time-based and blog search“.

Tony, along with co-founders Steve Nieker and Martin Remy, and advisors Matt Mullenweg, Mary Hodder and Toni Schnieder, have created Sphere in a very short period of time and for “less than $200k”.

I saw the live site and was allowed to bang on it as much as I liked. I did, and came away very impressed.

Relevance in blog search is very difficult. Google-type PageRank analysis, which looks at incoming links to a piece of content, simply doesn’t work because new content doesn’t have much in the way of links. Until now, no one has come up with a way to properly sort blog posts by relevance, and the general default way of showing results is “reverse-chrono”, which simply puts the newest stuff at the top.

Sphere appears to have solved the problem, or at least taken big steps in the right direction. Their approach involves three key algorithms – an analysis of links into and out of a blog, an analysis of metadata around a post (links, post frequency, length of posts, etc.), and something Tony calls their “secret sauce”, which is content semantic analysis to filter out spam and to understand what a blog post is talking about.

Result sets show only two posts per blog on the first page, so no one blog can dominate a category. The result set has auto-generated profiles of blogs that include recent links in and out of the blog, average posts per week, average words per post and a link to a full page profile that can be edited by the blog author.

To the right of the main result set are blog (as opposed to post) links that are relevant to the query, and something they call the “Daily Sphere”, which is links to relevant non-blog news stories. I imagine they may add additional content in the side area as well.

The results page integrates both ajax and flash features in an intelligent way (it’s not there just for show).

While Sphere has been indexing blogs since January of 2003, their index only shows results for the previous four months. They will lengthen this window as they scale up operations.

Sphere has tens of thousands of beta requests and is opening up to 100 lucky people this weekend. Sign up for the beta here.

If you haven’t seen the Web2.0WorkGroup yet, check it out. My original post on it is here.

We’ve added two new resources – Podtech.net and SolutionWatch.

Podtech.net is a very popular podcast site hosted by John Furrier that is redefining corporate press practices. Recently, for instance, Yahoo gave Podtech an exclusive pre-announcement right to discuss their podcasting service last weekend.

SolutionWatch, written by Brian Benzinger, focuses on new companies and products that are defining the web 2.0 landscape. Much like TechCrunch, Brian is helping to put perspective on how these products fit into the overall web ecosystem.

Check out Podtech’s podcast discussion of the group here.

Podtech.net and SolutionWatch join Dave Winer, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and WeBreakStuff as the early resources we’ve made available. More are coming soon.

Company: Rememberthemilk
Launched: October 2005
Location: Sydney, Australia

RememberTheMilk is a new ajax-rich to-do list that is similar to 37 Signal’s Ta-Da Lists.

RememberTheMilk lists are organized by tabs. Items are easily entered (although there is an extra click in there that bugs me). Clicking between lists is very straightforward. Items can be easily reordered. And you can also share lists and/or choose to make them public.

One thing RememberTheMilk does very well is to allow lots of metadata to be associated with a single task. Priorities can be set with a nice color-coded system, and there is flexibility in setting done-by dates. You can also add notes to a task.

A really nice feature is the ability to add tasks via email.

Reminders can be sent via email, instant messaging or sms. You can also subscribe to lists via RSS.

Overall, using RememberTheMilk is a much richer experience than Ta-Da Lists. Setting date reminders is particularly useful. However, there is a definite tradeoff in ease-of-use. Using Ta-Da Lists require no training, while I seem to be referring to the RememberTheMilk FAQs constantly to understand functionality.

RememberTheMilk was created by Emily Boyd, Omar Kilani and a stuffed animal named Bob T. Monkey (I prefer live mascots myself).

Qumana is an excellent wysiwyg online/offline tool for editing blogs. We’ve written about Qumana before and described their service, which is completely free.

Yesterday Qumana launched v 2.0 of their product. The primary feature addition is the ability to easily, very easily, add pay-per-click ads directly into blog posts.

Ads can be positioned anywhere, and there are a couple of formatting options to choose from (see arrows in screen shot below). Revenues are split 50/50 between Qumana and the publisher.

Ads are keyword driven based on tags you set for the post, and flow into RSS without any problems. Each Ad is tracked by keyword and clicks. Ads can also be previewed before final posting. The publisher has the flexibility to add as many or as few ads as he or she desires.

There are additional new features as well, including improved old post edits, better drag and drop tools, and better integration with wordpress and blogger.

This is the best tool I’ve seen for small (and large) bloggers to easily include ads in posts.

Company: Yelp
Launched: in Beta (since late 2004)
Location: San Francisco

Yelp is a website that allows users to write and share reviews of local businesses. It also has social networking features (adding friends, groups, etc.) to share reviews with a trust network. The idea is that people generally trust their freinds’ recommendations.

All of this user-generated content on local businesses, combined with the Yelp search engine, also provides great inventory for Yelp to sell local businesses contextual advertising.

The basics of Yelp: create an account, fill in your profile, add friends and write reviews. Yelp attempts to auto-fill the business information on a new review. The review consists of a 1-5 star rating and a free text area.

Searches bring up local businesses based on your zip code and include paid advertising above reviews.

Yelp is available only in San Francisco currently and plans to expand to other cities over time. They are also rumored to be closing on a Series A financing.

There are a number of other companies that are targeting local business reviews in an almost identical way. For instance, check out Judy’s Book, profiled previously and idealabs’ InsiderPages.

I’ve previously profiled Memeorandum, and there are no major announcements or feature releases to spur this new post.

However, something much more significant is happening because of Memeorandum, and I am not the only person to notice it.

Robert Scoble, who writes about it often, says “Anyway, sorry that I am fawning over it so much. It’s just changed my life, that’s all.”

Dave Winer writes “I find it’s changed the way I think about blogging. Not many of these tech gadgets do that.”

If you don’t know about Memeorandum yet, check out the site and read my profile. Memeorandum is the “newspaper” for anyone interested in what’s happening right now in politics or technology.

Regarding my statement in the title of this post, I really do believe that Memeorandum is forcing a subtle but important shift in the way many of us use the web.

Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, the conversation, are clustered underneath the headline.

This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it. If you then post on the subject, you will be linked into the discussion as well.

If I have limited time and I need to find out what’s going on, I turn to Memeorandum. I am on this site at least 15 times a day. I am finding that reading feeds in my reader (the old way I used to find out what was hot) takes much longer, has a much longer lag time, and significantly more noise (Memeorandum has virtually no noise – everything is relevant).

So Memeorandum is changing my reading behavior, but it is also changing my writing behavior. It is much easier for me to find and read everything that is being written about a topic (Memeorandum also includes links to the real time search engines for additional material). I find that I am more educated on the topics I write about, and am writing more often about things the web feels are important at the time.

It’s a damn ugly site, but it is the most useful tool I have to discover real time content on the web.

I am very pleased to announce that TheTwoWayWeb, written by Dave Winer, has joined our Web 2.0 WorkGroup. See our introduction to the workgroup here.

TheTwoWayWeb is one of Dave’s blogs where he writes longer, essay style posts on web 2.0 topics. Unlike Scripting News, Dave allows comments and trackbacks on this site. It is an excellent resource for web 2.0 thinking and news.

From the about page:

The Two-Way-Web is a vision for the Web as an easy writing and publishing environment. It’s not a new idea, in fact it’s the original vision of the Web as defined by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee who said in December 1997: “The intuitive editing interfaces which make authoring a natural part of daily life are still maturing.”

Most of the other companies interested in these technologies want to build a network of money, goods and services. I applaud this, but this is not my goal. I want to turn the Web into a powerful and easy to use writing environment.

Welcome, Dave!

UPDATE: Richard “yeaaah” MacManus and Fred Oliveira write on this too. Richard includes a picture from dinner (larger version of the one to the left).

Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path writes about Measure Map for the first time today.

Measure Map is an incredibly easy to use flash and ajax application that monitors blog traffic and analytics in many, many different ways. You can slice data almost every way imaginable. I’ll do a full review as soon as I have their permission.

In his post, Jeffrey provides a screen shot of the dashboard of the application, the first to appear publicly on the web. I took this as permission to post my own screen shot to the left.

They have not finalized pricing, but my understanding is it may be free for everything except real-time data. Jeffrey also says that the application should be launched by end of year. If you want to try it out sooner, request a beta account at their site.

Here is our quick pitch: Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs.

We do this with a few lines of code in your blog’s template; there’s hardly any configuration to worry about. We collect your traffic data continuously and in real time and display it through some innovative Ajax-based techniques. But even though we’re a hosted service, you own your data. An open API will empower you to do whatever you like with your numbers — we’ve already built an OS X Dashboard widget, for example. Imagine what else you could do with your blog’s stats…

We’ll be opening the doors soon — probably towards the end of the year. For now, we’re metering our growth with an invitation system to ensure that we can provide an appropriate level of service for our users as we grow. You can sign up for one at measuremap.com.

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about Measure Map, the experience of building it, and what our plans for it are. But for now, I’m just so happy our little team has reached this milestone. Now back to work.

We’ve been testing and writing about (scroll through search results) measure map for some time, and are big fans.

A funny side note: At the web 2.0 conference last week I was talking with Kevin Burton and Andy Smith about some of the new applications we are excited about. Measure Map came up, and they asked for a demo because they hadn’t seen it. Some tall guy in the room joined us and listened while I demo’d the product for them. That tall guy turned out to be Jeffrey Veen – I hadn’t met him in person yet and so didn’t recognize him. At the end of the demo, when I still didn’t know who he was, he started clicking links and showing data I didn’t even know about. Some of it was incredibly cool stuff. I looked at his nametag and everything of course fell into place. Very funny.

Company: Wink
Launched: in Private Beta
Status: Funded by Greylock Partners
Location: Mountain View

Wink gave a brief demo at at Web2.0 last week and we were immediately hooked. Wink is still in private beta (you can request an account on their home page), but I’ve had a chance to talk with CEO Michael Tanne and I’ve been using it all week.

At its core Wink is a search engine, and they’ve intelligently layered in shared user participation to give fresh, meaningful results that, Wink argues, can’t be found anywhere else. The key user participation features are tagging, rating and sharing.

Our goal at Wink is to combine search with user participation to give you fresher, more accurate, spam-free search. You can create tags, rate results and keep track of sites you’ve visited. You can create Search Sets of tags that show your expertise in a subject, and you can make those publicly available to be shared with other people. Wink also has concepts that are created and updated by users like you, so feel free to edit existing concepts, or even write your own!

Because Wink is “people-powered”, it will only get better when people tag, rate, and share. So please make Wink your default search engine, use it everyday, and let us know how you like it. And if you help us out by contributing or giving us feedback, we’ll give you some invitations of your own to send out!

Core search results are provided by Google and wikipedia. A search query returns those results, which you can tag and rate from 0-5 stars. A zero rating help to block out spam and other bad content, eventually removing it from the index altogether.

This user-created metadata (when aggregated) helps Wink return more relevant results to the entire community. Wink has taken del.icio.us bookmark data to fill out their results with rich tagging content right from the start.

For future queries, tagged/rated results appear above normal search results.

Also within search results is an area where Wink users are listed that have tagged results with the query used. Clicking on any user takes you to a page that shows all of their public tags and ratings. If you find that you like a user’s tags and ratings, you can subscribe to those results via RSS.

There are a ton of other features as well that I am discovering as I use the service. For instance, you can create a “search set” (it reminds me of Rollyo) that combines links to favorite sites along with tags.

As a side note, people are realizing that user-generated metadata may be the key to improving search results. Google has taken early steps in this direction with their early bookmarking product. In our profile yesterday, one of the comments opined that Google may be experimenting in this area. Perfect timing for Wink!

There is buzz that Microsoft and Yahoo will announce tomorrow that their instant messaging clients will beome interoperable. The catalyst seems to be the surge in Skype and Google Talk usage. Together MSN and Yahoo account for 44% of total IM usage today (not counting Skype and Google), and reach about 33.5 million monthly unique users.

UPDATE: This rumor was confirmed this morning via a Yahoo press release. The companies announced that interoperability for their 275 million combined customers will occur around Q2 2006. Hey, how about NOW?

Google has quietly launched a nascent bookmarking and tagging product as a feature to search history.

It’s not “social” bookmarking, like del.icio.us, because bookmarks are not public and cannot be shared among users. The product also requires way too many steps to create a bookmark.

To bookmark a site, make sure your google search history is turned on. Click “search history” on the top right of the results page. Bookmark a site by clicking on the star next to a result, and fill out the metadata.

There are some nice ajax features, including auto-fill for tags. Tags are space delineated and I noticed that the “,” key doesn’t work at all in the field – reducing tagging errors common to other applications.

To see tagged sites, click on the bookmarks link on the left sidebar. Bookmarks also appear on your personalized Google homepage.

Bookmarks are not public yet. If/once they are, this may be the first serious competition to del.icio.us (note that Yahoo’s product has had less than steller growth). Perhaps the portals should just acknowledge del.icio.us’ commanding network effect and (try to) acquire them?

There are a number of weblogs that I read religiously – of the 400+ feeds that I read, there are 15 or so that I check multiple times a day for new content.

Two of those blogs are Richard MacManus’ ReadWriteWeb and Fred Oliveira’s WeBreakStuff.

Richard and Fred write blogs that are very complimentary to TechCrunch. While we generally focus on new companies, Richard analyzes trends in the new web and Fred focuses on design, usability and development. To get an overall view of the space, I highly recommend reading all three blogs.

Today we’ve formed a loose alliance. You’ll see a “web 2.0 workgroup” logo on the left sidebar of this page – it links to a landing page – web20workgroup.com. On that page we have links to all three blogs, along with recent posts and our feed information.

We will be adding additional blogs over time. This is not a blog network or anything formal. We just like the idea of coordinating our ideas a little more closely.

Richard and Fred have also become good friends. Richard, who’s from New Zealand, has come to the U.S. for the first time to attend the Web 2.0 conference last week, and he’s been staying at my house while he’s here. Fred, who’s from Portugal, is also staying here while he works on our edgeio project.

Yahoo released a blog search product tonight at 7 pm. John Battelle had the scoop.

Unlike their podcasting product, released last night, the blog search product is not much more than a quick add-on to Yahoo News. Frankly, I am more than disappointed.

Instead of launching a stand alone property, Yahoo has integrated blog search into Yahoo News. Blog search results are presented on the right side of normal results, in a side-bar type area. For an example, see this search on “Web 2.0″.

I’ve inserted a big red arrow and blew up the image to more than twice the size we normally use so that you can actually see the results in the right area of the page.

Yahoo has also integrated Flickr and My Web 2.0 results. It’s unclear how relevant the results are but at first glance there is significant room for improvement. I am finding the UI completely unusable.

We wrote about Google Reader over the weekend and gave what I felt was a factually correct review of the product. However, some of the comments I’ve received to the post, along with a couple of emails, suggested some of my criticisms were off the mark. I took another look today and I must say that I was dead wrong on a few points.

I’ve copied my “areas to improve on” below and have bolded text that was incorrect:

As I mentioned above, Google Reader is targeting heavy RSS readers. The product isn’t useful, however, for moving through a large number of feeds efficiently.

Posts are listed in order of “relevance” (which doesn’t seem to actually sort things in any relevant way), or by date. I need posts to be grouped under the individual blog because I read some feeds first – Google Reader doesn’t allow me to do this and I am frustrated trying to find the authors I like to read the most. There is no search functionality within feeds already subscribed to, so there is no way to find this content.

The reader is slow. Paging down through posts results in a long and unacceptable delay. As a side note, importing my OPML list took about 10 minutes. Since this was a one-time cost, it’s not that big of a deal.

Since this is a web-based reader only, there is no syncronization.

Google uses ajax instead of frames. While frames is an old technology, readers using it allow for multiple scroll bars – this means you can keep the feed frames locked while scrolling through individual posts. This needs to be addressed.

There is no unsubscribe button for feeds.

Google Reader is optimized for Firefox. It isn’t working properly on other browsers yet.

The three innacuracies were:

• no sorting by feed (v. post)
• no search functionality within feeds
• no unsubscribe button

A quick look at the “My Subscriptions” link that is prominently displayed at the top of the reader shows that all of this functionality is included, and actually works quite well.

Under this tab, feeds are shown, can be sorted (second circle below), can be deleted, and, perhaps most importantly, can be searched (third circle) using the “filter” feature. Clicking on any particular feed brings up the related posts in the bottom window. It’s actually a very nice intuitive UI.

Google Reader is still painfully slow, but these features, which I previously missed, do much to make it a competitive product. In my opinion, the “my subscriptions” tab should optionally be the home page, reducing the necessary clicks to get there.

Company: Gada
Launched: October 10, 2005
Founder: Chris Pirillo
Location: Seattle, WA

Chris Pirillo has launched Gada.be today – a powerful tag meta-search engine that has an incredibly simple and thoughtful design. Shayne Sweeney is the developer who’s building Gada.

Gada takes a query and runs it against sites like Google News, Technorati, Flickr, IceRocket, Amazon, Wikipedia, 43Things, etc. Searches can be narrowed via a drop down box to “photos”, “social” etc. for more specific results. The search itself, and any narrowing, are also accompished via the domain name. For instance, a photo search for “web2con”, the tag people are using for last week’s web2.0 conference, is also accomplished by the URL web2con.gada.be/p. The query is the subdomain, and the photo filter is the /p at the end.

Allowing easy searches and filtering via the domain name structure is brilliant, and allows for very powerful mobile searches. Note also that the name “Gada” is extremely easy to type on a phone’s number pad.

It was borne out of several frustrations. If you’ve ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it’s a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and PSPs. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With “gada.be,” you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!

Then, there’s having to visit several sites just to get the results you want. Often, this isn’t feasible when you’re on-the-go. Even when you’re sitting with a laptop or chained to a desktop, it’s still a time-consuming process. We all love the individual search services, so why not bring ‘em together? Okay, that’s what we did. Moreover, we dynamically output OPML which you can turn around and import into your favorite news aggregator. gada.be saves everybody time!

It’s likely that Gada will become a much-linked to site for definitive results on a term, in a similar way as wikipedia is today. Gada incorporates all relevant information in a permanent URL, and so becomes a comprehensive result set for a tag link. Gada also outputs search results in RSS and OPML, allowing users to easily subscribe to and organize searches.

More on Gada on their about page.

Microsoft’s new ajax Hotmail client, called Kahuna, is massively expanding its beta group today, to approximatley 200,000 users. Until today the beta was extremely difficult to get into, frustrating some hotmail users.

We’ve been beta testing Kahuna for a few weeks. It is a big improvement on the old Hotmail interface, using ajax to provide a much more Outlook-like email experience. Features include a three-pane view and drag and drop functionality to folders, etc.

We previously wrote about Kahuna on August 16, 2005 and August 24, 2005.

Web 2.0 This Week
October 2 – 8

What a week! Web 2.0 was absolutely terrific. There were hundreds of smart and interesting people milling about and cross pollinating their ideas. Our focus was on the new companies, of course, and we briefly wrote about each and every one of them in our two part post “The Companies of Web 2.0″. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Here’s this week’s wrapup:

1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week

1-800-Free-411, iKarma, Ning, zvents (update), Flock (update), Attention Trust, Attention Trust #2, edgeio, Google Reader, Sphere, Yahoo Podcasts

2. Fred Wilson Thinks about Web 2.0 Companies

I had the chance to meet Fred Wilson at the Web 2.0 conference – I only wish I was able to pick his brain for a longer time. He writes a much-discussed blog post on “point” v. “end-to-end” solutions. A point solution is a stand alone web service – think Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo. An end-to-end solution is a group of services under one roof – think portals like MSN, Yahoo, etc. Generally, mass users like portal type solutions, but point solution are almost always better. Investors and entrepreneurs need to think about this, of course, when deciding on their eventual exit strategy. Must they aim to be bought by portals?

3. Will you be at TagCamp?

If you are near Palo Alto, a must-attend event is TagCamp on October 28-29, 2005. Will you be there?

Speaking of tagging, Barb Dybwad links to a Wired article on the subject that is worth the read.

4. How Much is Your Blog Worth?

Tristan Louis analyzes the Weblogs, Inc. acquisition and comes up with some very interesting thoughts on the value of blogs. Richard MacManus and Om Malik take the analysis even further.

Bottom Line: Inbound links are worth $564.54 each.

I’d like to see the analysis done from a different angle – how much is an RSS reader worth? See # 6 below.

5. Visualizing Del.icio.us

Brian Benzinger writes a great post listing all of the various visualization tools for del.icio.us data.

Hey Brian, per my #4 above, you owe me $564.54.

6. Bloglines Feed Data

Bloglines released some great data and insights on their blog.

While there are lots and lots of blogs, Bloglines says a blog is important if it has at least one subscriber – a fair measurement if you consider Bloglines’ market position (still dominant) and if you discount the fact that just about everyone subscribes to their own feed. By this measure, there are about 1.3 million “important” blogs. Four months ago there were 1.1 million such blogs. This makes up the “long tail”.

Things drop off quickly from there. Only about 37,000 blogs have 20 or more readers, and only 437 have at least 1,000 readers. The scientific term they use for the big guys? “Totally Sweet”.

7. CNet Top 100 Blogs

Thank you, CNet, for picking TechCrunch to include in your list of the Top 100 blogs. I’m not sure we belong, but it makes us feel great!

Yahoo just launched a comprehensive podcasting search, directory and listening service called Yahoo Podcasts (URL will be working in the next couple of hours). John Furrier at Podtech.net nailed this story and has posted an exclusive podcast with Geoff Ralston, Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer.

John has also posted the transcript of the interview below the podast link. Geoff has some interesting things to say:

Geoff Ralston – Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:

We want this to be as open as possible on both ends. We want to work with every device – however a user of Yahoo podcasts wants to consume their podcast, wherever they want to do it, whatever device, and on whatever jukebox. We’re going to work with them (jukeboxes) and we’re going to work with as many standards as possible using standard pcast format to integrate with a jukebox. You can listen to podcasts right on your computer, or you can listen to it right on the web itself. On the other end, we want to be as comprehensive as possible. If you have a podcast we’re going to find you, and if we haven’t found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we’ll get it into our index within 24 hours.

I spoke to John to get more information. He says that Yahoo will be issuing a press release shortly.

It’s very interesting and very cool that Yahoo did an exclusive podcast prior to issuing a press release. Right on!

UPDATE: Yahoo Podcasts is now live.