I have meant to post about AideRSS for months now, but I have been so busy at Suited Media gearing up for the launch of Pokerspace that I have completely disregarded this blog and its readers. Rest assured I will be able to put more time back to this blog in the coming months.

For those that are still listening, there is a something you should check out. Simply put, I am very impressed with some software, a web application, created by a small team of local professionals including a fellow UW graduate, Ilya Grigorik, the Chief Architect of AideRSS, Inc.

AideRSS may be the first tool I have found in a long while that has the potential to significantly improve on my Bloglines experiences. Bloglines has been my tool of choice for blog reading for years, but as past posts have detailed I have found some difficulties navigating and enveloping hundreds of feeds a day, many of which post a lot, some of which post rarely. I used to subscribe to almost 500 feeds, but I am now cut down to about 335.

After meeting Ilya I knew he was creating innovative and potentially important software. I met Ilya at my UW graduation ceremony a few months ago. We exchanged some of our experiences and entrepreneurial interests. Conversing with him before the ceremony confirmed my initial impressions that Ilya was a very interesting individual. We exchanged contacts and I actually added him to my LinkedIn, which is something I have never done with someone I have known for such a short time. Now, a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile shows he is linked to more than 100 very interesting people - I not surprised in the slightest.

I played with his site for a few hours one night after work and found it to be a very well designed web application. I explored the site throughly and found it be an exemplary example of modern web design. I imported my entire OPML feed of into the site and it performed flawlessly. The interface was clear and easy to follow. I especially liked the quality feedback it gives the user at the apprioriate times and places. Looking at the CSS confirmed my guess that it was a cleanly coded site. Without any hesitation I subscribed to the AideRSS blog.

I am also impressed with their technology, PostRank. In fact, I use a lot of the same ranking techniques myself and have
experience with most of the sites (Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.) that enable the AideRSS application. I still use a lot of these services to run what I call “tracking feeds” for myself, my company, and other key words I care about so that I can hear immediately whenever these terms are mentioned online. I used to love PubSub (if you remember of it… if not, research it). I wish it was still around. Wow, apparently it is coming back…

PubSub is undergoing redevelopment at the moment. We’ll be relaunching as PubSub 2.0 this winter with a host of exciting new features and services.

Anyways, I suggest you check out AideRSS.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites, tag them, and share your collection of links with others.

What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

I have subscribed to del.icio.us/popular since November 2004.

A few days ago I used a tool called del.icio.us linkbacks to investigate Echo Generation. I was able to find more people that have added Echo Generation to their del.icio.us bookmarks.

There are many del.icio.us tools, linkback is just one example.

del.icio.us is also a subject of recent research on social practices in a distributed classification communities.

Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.

On April 10th, del.icio.us owner Joshua Schachter announced (via delicious-discuss) that a group of investors has taken a minority stake in del.icio.us. The investment is lead by Union Square Ventures, and the team of investors includes Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young. Joshua will remain in control of the business. He says his first priority is improving reliability and responsiveness, followed by adding new features.

Why I blog this? del.icio.us is simple and effective. While I do not use it to manage my bookmarks at this time, I do benefit from the links others have bookmarked. I will likely use del.icio.us (or a similar service) in the near future. The linkback tool is quite cool too.

via Mindjack via Joi Ito

Today I found a great example of the type of innovation that web services allow for. Keita Kitamura and Yugo Nakamura have created an awesome flash-based visualization / book search engine / referral magnet / graphical search something called amaztype. They have used Amazon’s web services in a way that I find quite innovative. Try their Amaztype typeographic book search for yourself, I think you will also be impressed. I’m guessing they will make a fortune in referral fees for a modest amount of work - great idea.