Apparently several thousand blogs hosted at weblogs.com are now off the air (see this for more information). Bloglines archives all blog entries that we crawl (over 70 million at last count). If you have one of the affected blogs, and your blog was crawled by Bloglines, then we have at least some of your site archived (everything from the time we started crawling your site). We can dump the entries out into a text file, which will hopefully help in migration. Don’t know if your site was ever in the Bloglines system? To find out, try subscribing to your site if you already have a Bloglines account, or you can search the Bloglines archives for your blog. If your blog was crawled by us, and you want an export of everything we have for it, send an email to support (at) bloglines.com, and include the URL of your blog and/or the URL of your feed.

Thursday morning, I’ll be a guest on the RSS Weekly webcast. The topic this week is ‘How are news readers evolving? What will they become?’’. You’ll hear me talk about how Bloglines will evolve into a cure for world hunger, a method to end global warming, and a floor wax as well as a dessert topping. Oh, and an end to root canals and other dental maladies. I could talk about all of that and more. Or I could talk about how we are looking into ways of addressing the ‘information overload’ problem and adding all sorts of cool new features. Most likely, that’s what I’ll talk about, because, well, I’m boring like that.

This is fantastic. PCWorld’s latest issue has a review of some of the top aggregators, News on Demand. They gave Bloglines the highest ranking of any of the aggregators, tied with Feeddemon. They didn’t talk about some of the features that are completely unique to Bloglines, like personalized recommendations, email subscriptions, and references, but it’s still a great review.

Sorry I’ve been quiet lately, but I’ve been busy busy busy. I just wanted to mention a couple of things:

• Dave Winer is asking for reviews of aggregators. If you’re a Bloglines user, would you consider writing a review?
• Speaking of Dave, I sincerely appreciate the effort that he is leading to clarify the RSS 2.0 spec in regards to escaping practices, especially as they currently exist. Clarity is good.
• Finally, I really appreciate the efforts of Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim in building test cases for Atom and RSS. Writing test cases is absolutely no fun, but having them makes our lives as aggregator developers much easier. Thanks guys!

A Scan of the Headline Scanners:“Bloglines is free, powerful and intuitive, making it a good choice for those new to RSS. You can subscribe to hundreds of feeds without slowing the service (or your computer). It handles categories of feeds beautifully and has a strong search feature.” Thanks Ryan!