Really great quote from The RSS Weblog on a survey done of aggregator users:

Bloglines is on fire. A ton of people use it and love it enough to evangelize it.

It’s true, and we’re grateful for our wonderful users. Our stats continue to show a ‘hockey stick’ growth curve. And of course we’ve got some really great new features on the way.

In Analysis of an artificial meme, Greg analyzed the data generated by the GoMeme experiment launched by Nova Spivak. It doesn’t appear that the experiment yielded much info on how memes propagate, but what was interesting to me was the raw data, which can be found in an XML file at the end of the article. It contains the raw responses of the participants. One bit of information people were asked to include was which aggregator they used. I did a quick counting and came up with the following. A total of 154 people included the aggregator question in their response. The top aggregators were: Bloglines with 64 responses for 42% of the market NetNewsWire with 20 responses for 13% of the market SharpReader with 9 responses for 6% of the market Newsgator with 9 responses for 6% of the market Feed Demon with 6 responses for 4% of the market Firefox RSS Extension with 6 responses for 4% of the market

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been busy. Busy is good. As we continue to build out the team at Bloglines, I was reminded of something that first occured to me during ONElist’s early days about starting a company. As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it’s all about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary, a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a company. A big part of starting and building a company is about giving up. A founder is in a weird position. When you first start a company, everything is yours. You own all the stock, you make all the decisions. This point of creation is the only time this will be the case, however. Forever after, the founder must give up more and more control to other people and more and more ownership to employees, investors, etc. The founder must do this for the company to be successful, but at the same time this is the opposite of what many people are used to doing. Anyways, it’s just one more thing to consider when deciding whether to start a company. I’ve found that hiring and working with exceptional people and wanting to see them succeed makes the process much easier. Besides, running a company can be a lot of work, especially for us lazy folks. We need all the help we can get!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below). The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) — results and commentary will appear there in the future. Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate – the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs. The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.) INSTRUCTIONS To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later). REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers) (1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.mindingtheplanet.com (2) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software (3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.wingedpig.com (4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02/08/04 (5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 06:28:00 (6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Emerald Hills, California, USA OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers): (7) My blog is hosted by: Movable Type (8) My age is: 33 (9) My gender is: Male (10) My occupation is: Internet Entrepreneur (11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines (12) I use the following software to post to my blog: (13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 14/08/01 (14) My web browser is: Mozilla (15) My operating system is: Fedora Core 2

Dave asks why Bloglines uses a 3-pane interface. I guess Dave has never tried Bloglines, because we don’t use a 3-pane interface. I happen to completely agree with Dave that a 3-pane interface is the wrong interface for an aggregator. My guess is that if Dave tried Bloglines, he’d really like it. Bloglines uses a two-pane interface, which gives a little more flexibility than the single-page interface Dave likes. But here’s the thing. If you organize your feeds into folders, you can click on a folder to see all the new items within that folder at once. And, if you click on the top link in the left pane (the one with the count of your subscriptions), then all unread items for all your feeds are displayed. Just like a single-page interface. Best of both worlds. And if you still don’t like the two-frame interface, you can get to a single-page interface by just using the following link: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?all=1 Dave, I ask that you give Bloglines a try.