If you've been following the blogosphere you should know by now that the Google, Yahoo! and MSN search engines decided to start honoring the rel="nofollow" attribute on links to mean that the linked page shouldn't get any increased ranking from that link. This is intended to reduce the incentive for comment spammers who've been flooding weblogs with links to their websites in comment fields. There is another side effect of the existence of this element which is pointed out by Shelley Powers in her post The Other Shoe on Nofollow where she writes

I expected this reason to use nofollow would take a few weeks at least, but not the first day. Scoble is happy about the other reason for nofollow: being able to link to something in your writing and not give ‘google juice’ to the linked.

Now, he says, I can link to something I dislike and use the power of my link in order to punish the linked, but it won’t push them into a higher search result status.

Dave Winer started this, in a way. He would give sly hints about what people have said and done, leaving you knowing that an interesting conversation was going on elsewhere, but you’re only hearing one side of it. When you’d ask him for a link so you could see other viewpoints, he would reply that "…he didn’t want to give the other party Google juice." Now I imagine that *he’ll link with impunity–other than the fact that Technorati and Blogdex still follow the links. For now, of course. I imagine within a week, Technorati will stop counting links with nofollow implemented. Blogdex will soon follow, I’m sure.

Is this so bad? In a way, yes it is. It’s an abuse of the purpose of the tag, which was agreed on to discourage comment spammers. More than that, though, it’s an abuse of the the core nature of this environment, where our criticism of another party, such as a weblogger, came with the price of a link. Now, even that price is gone.

I don't see this is an abuse of the tag, I see it as fixing a bug in Google's PageRank algorithm. It's always seemed broken to me that Google assumes that any link to a source is meant to convey that the target is authoritative. Many times people link to websites they don't consider authoritative for the topic they are discussing. This notion of 'the price of a link' has been based on a design flaw in Google's PageRank algorithm. Social norms should direct social behavior not bugs in software.

A post entitled Nofollow Sucks on the Aimless Words blog has the following statement

Consider what the wholesale implementation of this new web standard means within the blogosphere. "nofollow" is English for NO FOLLOW and common sense dictates that when spider finds this tag it will not follow the subsequent link.

The author of the blog post later retracts his statements but it does bring up an interesting point. Robert Scoble highlights the fact that it didn't take a standards committee to come up with this just backchannel conversations that took a few hours. However as Tim Ewald recently wrote in his post "Make it easy for people to pay you"

The value of the standardization process is that it digs issues - architectural, security, reliability, scalability, etc. - and addresses them. It also makes the language more tighter and less vague

The Aimless Words weblog points out that it is unclear to anyone who isn't party to whatever conversations that went on between Google, MSN, Yahoo and others what exactly are the semantics of rel='nofollow' on a link. Given that it is highly unlikely that all three search engines even use the same ranking algorithms I'm not even sure what it means for them to say the link doesn't contribute to the ranking of the site. Will the penalty that Yahoo search applies to such sites be the same in Google and MSN search? Some sort of spec or spec text would be nice to see instead of 'trust us' which seems to be what is emanating from all the parties involved at the current time.

PS: I was wondering why I never saw the posts about this on the Google blog  in RSS Bandit and it turned out to be because the Google Blog atom feeds are malformed XML. Hopefully they'll fix this soon.

The New Yorker has an article by Seymour Hersh entitled THE COMING WARS: What the Pentagon can now do in secret where he discusses alleged plans the US administration has for invading Iran in the near term. To article is scary reading but the part that had me the most stunned is the following excerpt

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. "We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it."

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

"The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime."

This sounds suspiciously like the same reasoning that claimed that Iraqis would welcome the US led invasion with open arms. I know the saying "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is a cliché but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe someone should get these folks a copy of DJ Green Lantern's Shade 45: Sirius Bizness mixtape and put on track 10 where Immortal Technique opens up the second verse with

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam,
But that's bullshit i'll show you why it's totally wrong,
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight,
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fightin' for Bush or white americas dream,
I'd be fightin' for my peoples survival and self esteem,
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the south my nigga,
I'd be fightin' to be keep the occupation out my nigga,

It doesn't take an expert in Middle East history with a Ph.D to figure this stuff out. The continual waste of life and resources going on in the Middle East due the Bush administrations misadventures completely turns my stomach.

After several months of waiting for The Game's new album, The Documentary is finally out. I knew subscribing to Amazon's RSS feeds would come in handy.

G-G-G-G-G-Unit!!!

It had to happen sooner or later. MyMSN now supports adding RSS or Atom 0.3 feeds as content sources for your home page. RSS/Atom content modules can be customized to show articles from up to 1 day old to up to 365 days old, display from up to 1 article to up to 30 articles and either show article summaries as a tool tip or inline following the article headline. 

Below are screenshots of me testdriving the new features

1. MyMSN homepage with option to add RSS feeds as content modules
2. Adding Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed to my MyMSN homepage
3. Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed and Robert Scoble's RSS feed as part of my homepage

In addition the MyMSN folks also provide a handy way to create a link that enables people to add a feed to their MyMSN front page. The following link will add my RSS feed to your MyMSN front page

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss&ru=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog

Just as with other Web based aggregators there is also a handy button one can add to a website to enable one-click subscription to your RSS feed. This brings to a grand total of four buttons I need to add to my homepage; , , , and .

There is also an MSN RSS Directory that contains links to the RSS feeds produced by MSN properties such as MSNBC, MSN Autos and MSN Music.  

I'm really glad to see this ship. When I was first hired onto MSN I was supposed to work with the MyMSN folks on this effort but eventually things changed. Even though I haven't been directly responsible for this feature I've been in touch with the folks driving it and I think it is totally killer that Microsoft has finally officially cast a stone in the XML syndication waters.

Great work all around.

Derek has a post entitled Search is not Search where he alludes to conversations we had about my post Apples and Oranges: WinFS and Google Desktop Search. His blog post reminds me about why I'm so disappointed that the benefits of adding structured metadata capabilities to file systems is being equated to desktop search tools that are a slightly better incarnation of the Unix grep command. Derek wrote

I was reminded of that conversation today, when catching up on a recent-ish publication from MIT's Haystack team: The Perfect Search Engine is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search. One of the main points of the paper is that people tend not to use 'search' (think Google), even when they have enough information for search to likely be useful. Often they will instead go to a know location from which they believe they can find the information they are looking for.

For me the classic example is searching for music. While I tend to store my mp3s in a consistent directory structure such that the song's filename is the actual name of the song, I almost never use a generic directory search to find a song. I tend to think of songs as "song name: Conga Fury, band: Juno Reactor", or something like that, so when I'm looking for Conga Fury, I am more likely to walk the album subdirectories under my Juno Reactor directory, than I am to search for file "Conga Fury.mp3". The above paper talks a bit about why, and I think another key aspect that they don't mention is that search via navigation leverages our brain's innate fuzzy computation abilities. I may not remember how to spell "Conga Fury" or may think that it was "Conga Furvor", but by navigating to my solution, such inaccuracies are easily dealt with.

As Derek's example shows, comparing the scenarios enabled by a metadata based file system against those enabled by desktop search is like comparing navigating one's music library using iTunes versus using Google Desktop Search or the MSN Desktop Search to locate audio files.

Joe Wilcox (of Jupiter Research) seems to have reached a similar conclusion based on my reading of his post Yes, We're on the Road to Cairo where he wrote

WinFS could have anchored Microsoft's plans to unify search across the desktop, network and the Internet. Further delay creates opportunity for competitors like Google to deliver workable products. It's now obvious that rather than provide placeholder desktop search capabilities until Longhorn shipped, MSN will be Microsoft's major provider on the Windows desktop. That's assuming people really need the capability. Colleague Eric Peterson and I chatted about desktop search on Friday. Neither of us is convinced any of the current approaches hit the real consumer need. I see that as making more meaningful disparate bits of information and complex content types, like digital photos, music or videos.

WinFS promised to hit that need, particularly in Microsoft public demonstrations of Longhorn's capabilities. Now the onus and opportunity will fall on Apple, which plans to release metadata search capabilities with Mac OS 10.4 (a.k.a. "Tiger") in 2005. Right now, metadata holds the best promise of delivering more meaningful search and making sense of all the digital content piling up on consumers' and Websites' hard drives. But there are no standards around metadata. Now is the time for vendors to rally around a standard. No standard is a big problem. Take for example online music stores like iTunes, MSN Music or Napster, which all tag metadata slightly differently. Digital cameras capture some metadata about pictures, but not necessarily the same way. Then there are consumers using photo software to create their own custom metadata tags when they import photos.

I agree with his statements about where the real consumer need lies but disagree when he states that no standards around metadata exist. Music files have ID3 and digital images have EXIF. The problem isn't a lack of standards but instead a lack of support for these standards which is a totally different beast.

I was gung ho about WinFS because it looked like Microsoft was going to deliver a platform that made it easy for developers to build applications that took advantage of the rich metadata inherent in user documents and digital media. Of course, this would require applications that created content (e.g. digital cameras) to actually generate such metadata which they don't today. I find it sad to read posts like Robert Scoble's Desktop Search Reviewers' Guide where he wrote

2) Know what it can and can't do. For instance, desktop search today isn't good at finding photos. Why? Because when you take a photo the only thing that the computer knows about that file is the name and some information that the camera puts into the file (like the date it was taken, the shutter speed, etc). And the file name is usually something like DSC0050.jpg so that really isn't going to help you search for it. Hint: put your photos into a folder with a name like "wedding photos" and then your desktop search can find your wedding photos.

What is so depressing about this post is that it costs very little for the digital camera or its associated software to tag JPEG files with comments like 'wedding photos' as part of the EXIF data which would then make them accessible to various applications including desktop search tools. 

Perhaps the solution isn't expending resources to build a metadata platform that will be ignored by applications that create content today but instead giving these applications incentive to generate this metadata. For example, once I bought an iPod I became very careful to ensure that the ID3 information on the MP3s I'd load on it were accurate since I had a poor user experience otherwise.

I wonder what the iPod for digital photography is going to be. Maybe Microsoft should be investing in building such applications instead of boiling the oceans with efforts like WinFS which aim to ship everything including the kitchen sink in version 1.0.  

About two weeks ago there was an interview on C|Net with Bill Gates entitled Gates taking a seat in your den where he mentioned there had been 1 million MSN Spaces created in our first month. About a week later Mike Torres blogged that the number had risen to 1.5 million MSN Spaces created. In response to both of these statements about the growth of MSN Spaces I've seen a couple of detractors complaining about our adoption numbers. A prototypical example of the kind of these comments is the following post by Ed Brill entitled Gates: close to a million people on MSN Spaces. Ed Brill wrote

I made this comment on Scoble's blog, here for y'all as well...
Not to take this too far afield, but this is one of those fascinating examples of how MS is so good at staying "on message", but how bad it makes them look when that message lacks credibility. Those of us in the blogging community look at this "1 million" number with an extremely crooked eye, no offense to Mike Torres and his work. We all know someone who created an MSN Space only for the purpose of checking it out, and will never use it again. We know there are people who blog elsewhere that created Spaces because it's more free web space. We know that there are "people" who created more than one space, just like "people" have more than one Hotmail account. But BillG says "1 million" and the choir says "yea, verily."
...
It's a fascinating culture to observe from the outside, and it often works. But when the claim is too far afield, it does nothing to help the corporate image and credibility. (In this case, neither did BillG's comment that "So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE").

I was quite surprised by this outburst given that quoting the number of unique user accounts is common practice for online services. In fact in a recent press release from Six Apart entitled Weblogging Software Leader Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal it is stated

Six Apart, makers of the highly acclaimed Movable Type publishing platform and TypePad personal weblogging service, today announced that it has acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., the operators of the popular service LiveJournal, for an undisclosed amount of stock and cash. With the acquisition, Six Apart solidifies its position as the industry's recognized leader in weblogging software across all markets, and LiveJournal can continue its rapid growth trajectory under Six Apart's umbrella. As of today, the combined user base of both companies exceeds 6.5 million users, with thousands more added daily.

The 6.5 million user number above is calculated from about 1 million TypePad accounts and about 5.5 million LiveJournal accounts. Of course, anyone with a web browser can go to the LiveJournal statistics page where it states they currently have about 2.5 million active blogs out of 5.7 million blogs. In fact, according to the statistics page over 1.5 million blogs have never been updated. This means over 20% of the blogs on LiveJournal didn't get past the first post.

This isn't meant to single out LiveJournal especially since according to the Perseus blog survey from a few years ago, LiveJournal's retention numbers are the best in the industry. In fact, the Perseus blog survey estimates that about 66% of blogs are eventually abandoned. This is something that everyone on the MSN Spaces team is aware of and which Bill Gates himself alluded to in his interview that got Ed Brill so upset. Specifically Bill Gates said

Well, actually I think the biggest blogging statistic I know, which really blew me away, is that we've got close to a million people setting up blogs (Web logs) with the Spaces capability that's connected up to Messenger. Now, with blogs, you always have to be careful. The decay rate of "I started and I stopped" or "I started and nobody visited" is fairly high, but as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has gotten more sophisticated and value-added search capabilities have come along, this thing is really maturing.

Given that caveat I'm not really sure what more Ed Brill expects. Given that MSN Spaces has been in beta for less than 2 months we don't have meaningful 'active' user numbers yet although from our daily stats it seems we are at least in the same ratio as the rest of the industry.

One of the unfortunate things about working for Microsoft is that no matter what we do we tend to get attacked. Eventually one learns to filter out useful feedback from the 'I hate Microsoft' crowd.

I recently found a complaint about how NetFlix's RSS feeds appear in RSS Bandit from Danny Glasser, a dev manager on my team, in his post Netflix sucks less?. He wrote

Netflix has recently created RSS feeds for subscribers' current queues and recent rental activity, so in theory I can exchange the URLs with friends and view their queues in an RSS aggregator.  I've been playing with this a bit and unfortunately it doesn't render particularly well in RSS Bandit.  It doesn't sort nicely and old entries aren't expired properly.  I'm not sure if this is true with other aggregators but I suppose I could ask Dare. 

I decided to take a look at the various Netflix RSS feeds and the problem became instantly obvious. Below is an excerpted version of the Netflix Top 100 RSS feed which I'll use the discuss the various problems with syndicating lists in RSS.

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Netflix Top 100</title>
    <ttl>20160</ttl>
    <link>http://www.netflix.com/Top100</link>
    <description>Top 100 Netflix movies, published every 2 weeks.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <item>
      <title>1- Mystic River</title>
      <link>http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60031232&amp;trkid=134852</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Three childhood friends, Sean (Kevin Bacon), Dave (Tim Robbins) and Jimmy (Sean Penn) are reunited in Boston 25 years later when they are linked together in the murder investigation of Jimmy's daughter. ]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>2- The Last Samurai</title>
      <link>http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60031274&amp;trkid=134852</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Cruise stars as Captain Nathan Algren in this epic movie set in 1870s Japan. ]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>3- Something's Gotta Give</title>
      <link>http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60031278&amp;trkid=134852</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Sixty and still sexy, Harry (Jack Nicholson) is having the time of his life, wining, dining and bedding women half his age.]]></description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

There are several problems with the above feed. The first is a combination of the fact that no mechanism is provided for uniquely identifying items in the feed using GUIDs and the lack of dates in the feed.  The problem manifests itself when two weeks from now the top 100 list is refreshed. Using the above feed as an example imagine that a new entry becomes number 1 thus moving Mystic River and Last Samurai one notch down. Now several things break at once.

The first problem is that the user has no way of grouping together top 100 lists for each week so I can't have last month's top 100 list and this week's top 100 list in my aggregator in any sort of meaningful way. Even if there were dates the fact that there are no GUIDs means that the aggregator will likely use the <link> element to uniquely identify the item for determining whether the user has seen it or not. This means that only the new entrant to the list will be marked as unread while movies that were already in the list and have been seen remain unhighlighted. I can see arguments for both viewpoints. On the one hand Netflix may expect that the aggregator should always have 100 items in it with only the new entrants in the list being marked as unread and positions of movies changing from week to week. On the other hand, a user may want to keep the top 100 feeds for each time period in their aggregator so they can see a timeline of the movie rankings in their aggregator. In that case, every two weeks there should be a 100 new items waiting for the user. Unfortunately neither of these happens in RSS Bandit or a number of other aggregators with Netflix's current implementation. Instead old entries in the feed and new entries show up munged together with no separation of them based on date so users can't group by date. Another problem is that he link to the movie's page is the only thing used to uniquely identify the item. So when the feed is fetched and the position of a movie changes (i.e. the title changes) instead of creating a new item in the aggregator, RSS Bandit assumes it is a post whose title has been changed and simply updates the feed in place. This makes sense in 99% of aggregator scenarios when changing the title usually means a typo was fixed in a blog post. However in the Netflix case this means a movie will always show up with its most recent position in the top 100 list. BUT once the movie leaves the list (i.e. is dropped off the feed) the movie will remain at its last position seen in the feed within the aggregator.

The second problem is the fact that there is no way to tell the aggregator how to sort the list of movies. Sorting using the title won't work because it will be an alphabetical sort, ditto for using the description. Even if there were dates, using those for sorting wouldn't make much sense either. Ideally there would have to be some way for the item to specify its position relative to other items in the same list with it at a given point in time. Again, this would require the dates should be attached to the items in the feed.

There are a number of issues raised by the Netflix problem. One could look at the problem as an indication that there should be an item expiry mechanism in RSS so the aggregator should know to dump the list every 2 weeks and refresh it with the new list. Others could argue that this could be solved by giving each item a unique ID independent of the movie and specify its date as well as a sort position. This would allow the user to track changing lists over time even if the same item appears in the list multiple times.

I don't think I've seen anyone raise any of the various problems with the Netflix feeds online. This is surprising since I'd be hard pressed to imagine how any aggregator does the 'right' thing with these feeds. More importantly the Netflix feeds show a significant hole in RSS as well as syndication formats like Atom whose primary goal seems to be RSS feature parity.

I'm going to bring this up on the RSS-AggDev mailing list and see what the other aggregator developers think about this problem.

Its begun to spread around the blogosphere that MSN has added support for RSS to a couple more of its web offerings. Yesterday on the MSN Search weblog, Brady announced that there are now RSS Feeds for Search Results on the MSN Search beta site. The URL below returns an RSS feed containing the first 20 items for a search for 'rss bandit'.  

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=rss+bandit&format=rss&count=20

Looking at the results returned using Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer it seems the results don't return the Last-Modified or ETag HTTP headers. This means every time the aggregator queries the feed it'll get an XML document downloaded even if nothing has changed in the search results since the last time the query was sent. So as not to waste bandwidth on the client side I'll probably specify that the MSN Search feeds should only be fetched once a day. One surprising thing is that sponsored links don't show up in the search results. I'd have expected that they would given that they are often relevant to the search as well.

This is totally cool feature. The MSN Search folks are doing good things.

I've been playing around with the photo album in my MSN Space and have begun to get interested in online photo sharing. I've never been big on taking pictures. The last time I took pictures were on my vacation in Hawaii with the ex last year but I didn't even get them after the breakup. Before that it was Freaknik in 1998. However after playing around with the MSN Spaces photo album I feel like sharing some pics other than RSS Bandit screenshots as part of my space. I'd definitely appreciate any tips from folks out there on purchasing a digital camera.

Once I was done geeking out about the MSN Spaces photo album I decided to check out what other hosted blogging services provided with regards to photo sharing. This is where I found out about Hello and BloggerBot. For those who aren't aware of it, Hello is an application for sharing images with people in real-time. A sort of instant messaging client with a photo slideshow feature. The BloggerBot feature of Hello allows you to post images to your blog hosted on Blogger.com from the Hello application. This integration makes sense since the company that created Hello was recently purchased by Google.

During my next daily rap session with Mike about Spaces, I brought up the photo sharing features of Hello and its integration with Blogger. Mike pointed out that a similar user experience was already possible using MSN. This is where I first learned about MSN Premium. The MSN Premium service is an MSN offering that provides a bunch of value adds to browsing the Web for under $10 a month. It includes a firewall, anti-virus software, Encarta, Microsoft Money, Outlook plugins and a number of photo management features. I tried the service yesterday and so far I like it. The MSN Outlook Connector which allows you to access Hotmail from Outlook is quite nice.

The photo sharing features of MSN Premium come in a couple of flavors. The first part is MSN Messenger Photo Swap which enables you to initiate a photo sharing session with any MSN Messenger user. This seems to be provide an equivalent experience to the real-time photo sharing features in Hello. Here is a screenshot of Mike Torres using Messenger Photo Swap to show me his vacation pics. The second major photo sharing feature of MSN premium is called Photo Email. With Photo Email you can send photo slideshows to people as regular HTML email. The email slide shows are a compressed version of a slide show of the full resolution images hosted on an automatically generated Web site which is linked to from the email. People can then view the full slide show then either download the images for printing or order prints online. Here is a screenshot of Photo Email I sent to myself of a modified version of RSS Bandit.

The ActiveX slideshow control used to host the images on the automatically generated website is extremely similar to that used by MSN Spaces. It shouldn't be too hard to send some sort of MSN Spaces photo email to invite people to view the photo album on your Space. I should remember to add this as a feature request on the MSN Spaces Wiki. 

Then there is still the question of how one sends a picture to their MSN Spaces blog as a blog posting the same way Hello allows one to do so using the BloggerBot. The answer is the email posting feature of MSN Spaces. Simply enable Mobile Publishing on Mobile Settings tab of the Settings page of the MSN Space. Enter an email address (e.g. your mobile phone email if you are a moblogger) and turn on “publish immediately.” Enter a secret word. You can now blog direct to that email address (e.g. carnage4life.blogthis@spaces.msn.com) with a photo attachment and/or text. The subject of the e-mail becomes the subject of the post.

The folks behind FeedBurner have a blog post about RSS Market Share which discusses the distribution of aggregators they see polling their most popular feeds. They write

...RSS Client market is not yet consolidating, it's expanding. There were 409 different clients polling the top 800 FeedBurner feeds in September and now there are 719 different clients. FeedBurner actively catalogs the behavior and specifications for hundreds of these user-agents...

...This list is heavily skewed toward aggregators used on blog feeds, since most of our feeds are from blogs. This list might read quite differently for more traditional media feeds such as Reuters, NYT, CNET, etc. On a similar theme, individual publishers will notice that the overall market share may be wildly different from their own feed's market share. Simply removing our top 10 feeds from this data results in a wildly different market share list, possibly because of clients that ship with one or more of our top 10 feeds as a default. All of this pointing to the caution not to read too much into this single data point. We could make qualifications about everything on the list. Your mileage may vary, caveat emptor, mea culpa, c'est la vie..

Top 20 RSS clients across FeedBurner most highly subscribed 800 feeds as of January 6, 2005

Aggregator Name (Market Share Percentage)
1. Bloglines (32.86%)
2. NetNewsWire (16.95%)
3. Firefox Live Bookmarks (7.78%)
4. Pluck (7.20%)
5. NewsGator Online(4.45%)
6. (not identified) (4.07%)*
7. FeedDemon (3.83%)
8. SharpReader (3.27%)
9. My Yahoo (2.58%)
10. iPodder (2.42%)
11. NewsGator (2.23%)
12. Thunderbird (2.13%)
13. RSS Bandit (1.12%)
14. NewsFire (1.05%)
15. iPodderX (1.02%)
16. Sage (0.71%)
17. FeedReader (0.67%)
18. RssReader (0.54%)
19. LiveJournal (0.46%)
20. Opera RSS Reader (0.45%)

Although interesting, their numbers probably aren't reflective of the reality of the RSS aggregator market share. LiveJournal has over 5 million accounts with at least half of them being active users. I suspect there are far more people using their LiveJournal friends page as an RSS aggregator than the entire top 10 list combined.

However this does bring up a question I've been considering for a while. What should be the default feeds in an RSS Bandit installation? Besides the various RSS Bandit feeds we also subscribe the user to the RSS feeds for Microsoft Watch, Yahoo! News, BBC, Rolling Stone, Slashdot, Boing Boing and InstaPundit. I've been considering removing a few of these feeds such as InstaPundit since I don't read it regularly but the one or two times I've read it I didn't think much of it. I've also considered adding more blogs I read such as Robert Scoble or Dave Winer.  

Given that RSS Bandit is moderately popular with about 50,000 downloads of the most recent version and about 130,000 total downloads over the past year I'm sure we'd be contributing a decent amount of readership to whatever feeds we install as default. Therefore I'd like some ideas from our users on what you think the best mix of feeds should be for folks installing RSS Bandit for the first time which in certain cases may be their first RSS aggregator.