Interesting data on aggregator hits by Mark. He doesn’t mention Bloglines, but I pointed out in the comments to that entry that he has 456 subscribers who read his site through us. Now the numbers aren’t exactly apples to apples. You could argue that just by counting unique IPs, as he did, that there will be some amount of overcounting, due to people hitting his site from multiple IPs due to dynamic IP addressing. Unfortunately, there’s no other way to gauge the popularity of the various aggregators and aggregation services. Anyways, the numbers taken at face value put us at number two in terms of popularity, behind NetNewsWire, a Mac-only aggregator. I guess this is an appropriate time to mention that we will soon be announcing an OS/X version of the Bloglines Notifier. It’s just getting some final polishing right now, and should be ready very soon. In addition to that, and the features that we rolled out over the weekend, we have several more things in the works at Bloglines. Stay tuned! Update: While Mark has updated his post based on some other comments, he still isn’t including Bloglines in the graph or even mentioning us. For completeness, I would think he’d want to include us. There are some nice comments attached to that entry about Bloglines, including one from Tim Bray who says that his mother is quite happy using Bloglines. That’s perfect because that means that we’re succeeding with our goal of making Bloglines easy to use.

Over the weekend, we pushed a couple of changes to the internal architecture of Bloglines. The changes were designed to off-load work from one of the databases (the Bloglines back-end consists of several different databases, spread over multiple machines). While the system was fairly responsive before the changes, these changes will help us continue to scale up. Last week was our best week so far, in terms of traffic and user growth. We have over 11 Million entries in the database. Alexa ranked us at 1,014 in terms of Internet traffic (our traffic drops on the weekends, so the number is higher right now). Traffic ranking systems are always inexact, but we are continuing to grow. Scaling an Internet service is equal parts science and art. There is no one set blueprint that you can apply to every type of service. There are some basic concepts that you can adhere to, but everything else is application specific and varies over time. As long as you have growth, you are never done scaling an Internet service. It’s a fun but demanding challenge.

We launched a new feature for Bloglines yesterday, search feeds. You can search on something and then subscribe to that search. It appears as a normal subscription and whenever new items are received that match your search, they show up. In other Bloglines news, this is so cool, I could pop:

Hmmm…I wonder how many people have “taught” Bloglines. I did today, showing my students the wonders of aggregation and setting them all up with accounts. They all subscribed to the New York Times front page, and I’m going to be feeding them some feeds on a pretty regular basis. The important thing at this stage is that they get the concept.

Came across the following this evening: “Client side aggregators are so 2002.”

Yesterday, I had my first aerobatic flying experience. I went up in N117PS, a Pitts Special S/2B owned by Attitude Aviation in Livermore. I have always thought that Pitts biplanes were cool, and I was right. The thing is a rocket. Extremely responsive. Think about turning, and it happens. There’s very little forward visibility (ie. none), so you have to work around that, especially when landing. First we did some aileron rolls. After a couple of examples, I was able to do those pretty easily on my own. Lift the nose 30 degrees or so, then stick to the side, with no rudder deflection. After that, Andy showed me a couple of loops. At that point I needed a break, so we landed at Tracy and fueled up. Back in the air we did a couple of hammerheads. The first one was straight up with an inverted roll-out at the top. The second one we spun on the way up and did a ‘humpty’ over the top. That was it for me and I had to ask for an end to the festivities. I recovered enough to fly the plane partly back to Livermore, where Andy took over and landed. The G meter read +4/-1 Gs for the flight. They say you build up a tolerance to aerobatics over time, and that everyone has problems in the beginning. Even though I felt ill for part of it, I had a great time and will be going again. It’s more intense than any rollercoaster you can imagine. I think mastering the Pitts will be a fun challenge, and I’ve been told that aerobatic training makes you a better pilot.