"Bloglines is arguably the number one tool for aggregating RSS feeds"

Oh please, stop with the hype. Or at least substantiate the claim. I've used many different aggregators over the last few years and have gotten no sense that BlogLines is the most used or most highly regarded of them (I have used it but it's not my preferred reader); just yesterday Dare Obasanjo's latest version of RSS Bandit was getting lots of positive blogging and personally I have found nothing better than SharpReader to suit my style. Nothing against BlogLines and I'm happy for Mark Fletcher, but your exaggeration surely rubs me the wrong way.

Heh, okay:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002574.php

http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000961.html

Also, Mark Fletcher's analysis of the BoingBoing stats, while obviously from a biased source, is worth reading:

http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/000188.html

I think arguing that it is the #1 tool for RSS aggregation is pretty easy.

Anonymous, none of those cited links seem to hold up under rigorous examination. To quote the BurningDoor post: "Some of these (eg, Bloglines, My.Yahoo, NewsGator Online) relate the number of subscribers on behalf of whom they're polling when they make http requests, but others do not. Therefore, straight away, we can tell you that the market share numbers are skewed to the extent that the currently non-reporting proxies have sizeable numbers of subscribers."

And that's just one caveat. Further, even if BlogLines has the top current marketshare you're conflating this with quality and my primary complaint is with the post's fanboy, unsubstantiated tone. After all, I don't write an RSS reader and have no particular horse in the race; after yesterday's postings I plan to test out the new RSS Bandit and YouSubscribe (http://www.yousoftware.com/subscribe/) to see if they suite my habits better.

Anon is right. In fact, I would've put it like this: "Bloglines is *clearly* the number one tool for aggregating RSS feeds". Take a look at the links Anon provides (one goes to my site).

Looks like Bill and I posted our comments above at exactly the same time. So I just want to add that, yes Bill there are caveats to the data. There's no getting around that with the current state of RSS statistics. But even factoring those caveats in, Bloglines has such a big lead that it would be very difficult to argue that anybody else could be number 1.

And it's got nothing to do with "quality". Market share is about facts and figures - as best that we can come up with in the blogosphere anyway...

Thanks for the comments, Bill. Coupla things. I said that Bloglines was "arguably'' the number one tool, which means "open to argument.'' I think there is ample anecdotal evidence (including our user logs here) to suggest that it's one of the most-used aggregators, if not the most-used. But I can't say with certainty that it is. Second, my intent was not to conflate market share with quality. My opinion on that is not relevant. I merely wanted to underscore what a potentially significant acquisition this is for Ask Jeeves. They're not getting a minor player in the aggregator world. They're getting a company with a lot of mindshare...though admittedly things are still very early in this space. Apologies if that came across as being "fanboy.''

Perhaps you thought that when I said "the most compelling technology to emerge in the last few years'' I was referring to Bloglines, when in fact I was referring to RSS itself. Cheers.

I appreciate the clarification.

I feel completely underwhelmed when I hear RSS-related technologies called "high tech." Polling networked content sites for aggregated content is as old as 1960s Telex/TWX stations with their paper-tape programs to get weather from NWS and market reports from the commodity exchanges.

There is a terrible cognitive disconnect between "internet technology" and the cutting edge of semiconductor applications (e.g. video cellphones, new signal processing applications, mass storage breakthroughs, etc.) There's just no comparison.

I suppose that if people spend most of their working lives directly connected to a particular technology, it biases their opinion of it. I've had enough of such navel-gazing. Please no more "internet high technology" unless there's something new and useful about it.

Thanks for the link to my post on www.geekblog.org. If anyone's interested in why I'm worried about preserving Bloglines' services, I wrote a post a while ago detailing why I love the service, and what it offers that most other aggregators don't. You can find the post here:

http://www.geekblog.org/2005/01/why-i-love-bloglines.html

Josh Bancroft
www.tinyscreenfuls.com
www.geekblog.org