My friend, and internet super sleuth Gary Price, has been talking about tools to track content changes when there's no RSS available. It's something I used to use years back, but long since fell out of the habbit with. But for news bloggers in particular, the post he points to by fellow librarian Marshall Kirkpatrick and his own round-up for Search Day are a veritable gold mine of information on how to keep ahead of the pack when it comes to being first with the story.

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When the Bloglines Plumber is making an appearance, I realize just how dependent I am on Bloglines. Not as a reader, I've long prefered a desktop app to a hosted solution for this very reason, but traffic-wise, a site like Performancing relies pretty heavily on the blogosphere's #1 reader.

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Canadian company Serence recently released V3.0 Beta of their KlipFolio(tm) RSS Dashboard software. This free, configurable, rollable, scrollable RSS/Atom/RDF reader uses a visual paradigm and currently handles 37 languages (using double bytes). Currently, KlipFolio runs only on Windows 2000 and XP. A MacOS version is in the works, but no word of a Linux version yet. [Hyperlinks below the sample image, at bottom.]

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The most important link on Performancing, the recent posts list, is about to get a whole bunch more important. Today we officially launch the Performancing Member Forums, where, you, and we, can ask questions, post opinions and generally chat about blog related topics. The best way to track what's going on in those forums is of course the recent posts link, that you'll find on the right hand menu.

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Now that a quality free web analytics solution is available in Google Analytics (when it works), bloggers who previously didn't want to spend the money are now taking a good look at analytics and what it can do for them. It's neat to see some data, but how do you actually make that data work to improve your blog?

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A week or so back, we had a discussion and poll on what we thought about full or partial feeds. Surprisingly, the poll turned out very close to 50/50 on whether Performancing members publish full or partial feeds.

We've wanted this site to be full feed from the start, but the Drupal system doen't allow for it, and i've been meaning to take a peek at the code, and try to hack it for a while. Last night I got a nudge in that direction from Robert Scoble though, and as a result, i've just hacked this beast into producing a full feed!

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I love reading blogs, what I love more is finding new blogs. This is an open call for you to tell us who do you love? Which blogs could you not live without and why? Here are some treasures to start you off ..

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I use del.icio.us, and I love it. It's not without it's problems though. Due to sheer weight of numbers, more often than I'd like, the server is flaky, and some of the tags are so busy, that it's impossible to keep up. And some of those tags are so spammed out that it's not worth keeping up.

Enter Yahoo's MyWeb2.0, a reasonably well known service, but a vastly underated one in my opinion.

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A new, and welcome addition to my feed reader recently has been Jack of all Blogs, a kind of snarky, foulmouthed cynical rantfest that takes aim squarely at the often pretentious, trend jumping "digirati" personalities in the blogosphere. It's just the kind of thing I like, and i'd highly recommend a subscription. Im not here to talk about that though, JOAB just kindly provided me with some inspiration for a discussion here, in the post 7 Secrets of the 80/20 Blogger. Namely, that bloggers need to quit feeding at the trough!

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Whether you view other blogs in your niche as "the competition" or, or like Performancing, part of your community, they still have information about your niche that you may not. Particularly if you're the new kid on the block. Your initial visitors may also have a lot of information that could benefit you. The question is, how do you get that data?

There are two little known, yet very effective ways of gaining a jumpstart on niche data. Both methods involve letting your competition, and visitors do the hard work for you. Neither of these methods use anything even remotely evil, you can get all the information you want from publically viewable sources. Let me show you how...

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Hey, my friend Rich Ord from iEntry is blogging! Rich knows his stuff, as his empire shows, but now he's blogging at WebProBlog on "internet advertising, email marketing, search engines, eBusiness strategies". I'll go out on a limb here and say that that's a blog worth subscribing to.

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If you're anything like me, your list of feed subscriptions is an unruly beast at best, and an absolute horror of time and attention devouring evil at worst. Yes we need to be subscribed to feeds in order to blog on our given subjects, but is having over 400 subscriptions good research, or poor feed management?

Recently i engaged in a little conversation about the amount of feeds one could realisticly keep up with. It turns out, that the figure is around 150. Bearing in mind that at the time I was at well over 400, i've been on a major feed culling mission for a week now. Currently im winning the battle, but it's tough, really tough.

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