Of course, if you ask my family, they’ll tell you I’ve had an ego problem for awhile now. But now, with this piece from Jon Udell over at Infoworld, I’m just going to be completely unbearable to be around. :)

Since last fall, I’ve been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced users. I’ve now added myself to that list. Hats off to Mark Fletcher for putting all the pieces together in such a masterful way.

Courtesy of the fine Six Apart folk, I’ll be at the Blog On conference tomorrow. I always enjoy meeting Bloglines users, so if you’re one and at the conference tomorrow, please introduce yourself. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the dinner/party afterwards, but I’ll try.

With the launch of the new Bloglines user interface a couple of weeks ago, we started publishing subscriber numbers for every blog in the system. Previously, we had only listed subscribers who had public profiles enabled, which is a small percentage of the subscriber base. Now, we include a total subscriber count with each feed. Richard MacManus has some interesting thoughts as he analyzes this information.

Chad Dickerson has a really interesting article up at Infoworld in which he talks about the problem with desktop RSS aggregators:

Fast forwarding to the present, InfoWorld.com now sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity at the top of every hour, presumably because most people configure their newsreaders to wake up at that time to pull their feeds. If I didn’t know how RSS worked, I would think we were being slammed by a bunch of zombies sitting on compromised home PCs. Our hourly RSS surge has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack, and although the requests are legitimate and small, the sheer number of requests in that short time period creates some aggravating scaling issues.