Bloglines did another update today, adding a new Bloglines Top 1000 section, showing off the 100 most popular blogs, along with data on which ones are moving up or down, and sidebars with the new blogs on the list and the biggest movers. You can also go to the preview page for any feed and see its ranking, even if it isn’t in the top 1000, if you know its siteid. For example, this blog, with 54 subscribers, is ranked 22,975.
InsideGoogle is thankfully in 843 place. If you don’t like your ranking, you can claim multiple feeds your site has and consolidate them, so total subscriber count is given credit, rather than seperate Atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 feeds and so on.
In the first ranking, Slashdot’s 103,771 subscribers makes it #1. Dilbert is 10,000 behind, followed by Engadget. The official Google blog is eighth. Gizmodo is #17 and #74, and adding the two subscriber counts together could make it number 7. There are a good number of site’s that would rank much better if they consolidated feeds.
Also, Bloglines shipped some minor improvements, continuing to improve beta Bloglines. I only spotted them because I live my life in Bloglines, but one of them made my life a hell of a lot better.
They changed the behavior of the “f” hotkey, which loads up the next folder of feeds. Instead of opening the folder, it keeps the folder closed and selects it, loading all feed items from that folder, exactly like I normally do with the mouse. Using the “f” key and “j” key, you can go down through items (”j,j,j,j”), then when you reach the end, load the next folder (”j,j,j,f,j,j,f,j”).
I’m breezing through my feeds now faster than ever before. They seem to have improved the performance as well, though that could just be my imagination.
Another improvement: The title bar now shows the number of unread feed items, as well as the number of items you’ve pinned. Whether you keep Bloglines open in a seperate browser window or in a tab, you will always have a cound of the number of unread items to rely on while you’re doing something else.
Finally, they made the address bar update with a unique URL based on what you are viewing. This way, if you hit refresh or restore a browser session, everything will be right back where you were, still reading the same feed as before.
So, another month, another update for Bloglines. What a great pace for them to be keeping up. Sure, its little things, but if Bloglines gets a little bit better every month, just imagine how amazing it can be in the long run. They really are listening to the users and giving people what they want. Gotta love it.
Got an email from Tammy, owner of Spudgy, the sleepy dog that placed third for “Most Adorable” video in the YouTube awards with the video of the cute li’l dog trying and failing miserably to stay awake. She thanked me for saying that Spudgy’s video was easily the best one nominated in the whole contest (I don’t understand how it lost to a video about a bird commiting suicide*), and said they hope to be adding more videos of Spudgy to YouTube.
Besides the nominated video above, there’s also these two:
He so thinks nobody notices…
There’s a fourth video, not available on YouTube, of Spudgy barking to a Steve Miller Band song, available on Spudgy’s website, Spudgy.com. The Flash animation when you go to the website is pretty funny, since apparently Spudgy has a problem where he blows huge bubbles out of his nose (video, please!). The “Spudgy Adventures” part of the site is pretty funny, with Photoshopped pictures of the little guy.
As you can obviously see, I will take any excuse to post videos of cute dogs. Feel free to send me links to others you like.
* - For the record, I like “Kiwi!“, but it was sad, not adorable. A great effort, but there’s nothing adorable about that ending.
TechCrunch has written about how OpenSocial was hacked, with security vulnerabilities exposed twice with barely half an hour of work each time. It’s never fun to see a platform hacked, but this doesn’t imply a systemic problem with OpenSocial. Because OpenSocial uses regular old web standards for practically everything, the same vulnerabilities that web developers have to worry about, OpenSocial has to worry about.
In Google’s rush to get OpenSocial ready, it may have left a backdoor open. In their rush to have the first web apps released, the iLike and RockYou applications might have been released with openings for hackers to get in. In time, these won’t be a problems, but application developers need to work harder to lock down their code so this doesn’t happen often.
Crave and Gizmodo are laughing at some of the strange search queries being suggested by Ask.com’s suggest feature, which suggests complete or longer queries as you type in the search box. They’ve got examples like:
“is it legal to”, which suggests completing that with “marry your second cousin”, “own a penguin” or “sell a kidney
“can you” :: “freeze cheese”, “get pregnant in a hot tub”
Clearly, some of Ask’s users have some strange things in mind. Here are some search suggestions I found, with the suggested part in bold:
why did Jeeves retire
why do i never see baby pigeons? (answer: because pigeons don’t leave the nest until they are almost as large as adult pigeons)
why does my eye twitch
why does asparagus make urine smell
why does my belly button hurt
why does my urine smell (perhaps you had asparagus?)
i wanna to be anorexic
how to knock someone unconscious
where is my liver
Also, I noticed there are words that you won’t see in Ask’s suggestions, mostly curse words and some body parts, like fu(k, a$$, a$$hole, su(k, pi$$, peni$, v4g1na, and pretty much anything a parent wouldn’t want their children seeing when typing into a search engine. Plus: “naked”.
Yeah, I used |337 instead of typing the words, because the second I read that sentence normally, I felt like a kid again, looking through the dictionary and laughing when I found something “naughty”. Plus, I don’t need Google’s SafeSearch filter flagging me. I don’t hesitate to use any language, but in a list like that, it feel immature.
Anyway, go to Ask.com and play around with the search box. Let me know if you find anything funny.
