New Bloglines Forum

A new Bloglines Forum was created for users to discuss Bloglines, and for developers to discuss the new Bloglines Web Services that were just recently added.

Who are the MSN Search Champs?

Robin Good posted the members of the MSN Search Champs advisory group.



They are, in no particular order:

Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Paul Aelen, Ian Grayson, Chris Pirillo, Matt Paines, Kris Abel, Peter Stewart, Steven Bink, Don Park, Jason Dunn, Matt Miller, Andrea di Stefano, Aurelio Minerbo, Marc Mitrani, Buzz Bruggeman, Greg Boser, Maurizio Bergami, David Weinberger, Phil Bradley, Peter Da Vanzo, Loren Heiny, Brad Turcotte, Doug Seven, Alan Reiter, Gérald Claessens, Luca De Biase, Dave Winer, Marc Orchant, Marjolein Hoekstra and of course Robin Good.

It is a pretty diverse group from around the world including Denmark, France, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom as well as the United States.

Alexa Web Info Service (beta)

New beta program at Alexa: Alexa Web Information Service

The Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS) provides developers with programmatic access to the information Alexa Internet (www.alexa.com) collects from its Web Crawl, which currently encompasses more than 100 terabytes of data from over 4 billion Web pages. Developers and Web site owners can use AWIS as a platform for finding answers to difficult and interesting problems on the Web, and incorporating them into their Web applications.



Developers have free access to the Alexa Web Information Service during the Beta, but usage is restricted to 10,000 requests per day per developer.

VIA: Geeking With Greg

Atom Links Disappearing from New Gmail Updated Accounts

Commenters at MicroPersuasion, including Steve Rubel, are reporting that the Atom Link in their Gmail accounts are now disappearing. The plot is thickening!

Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web

WebReference was granted the rights to republish excerpts from the book "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web" by permission of Manning Publications. A very detailed synopsis of what the Symantec Web means and how it may be achieved.

"For the Semantic Web, semantic indicates that the meaning of data on the Web can be discovered—not just by people, but also by computers. In contrast, most meaning on the Web today is inferred by people who read web pages and the labels of hyperlinks, and by other people who write specialized software to work with the data. The phrase the Semantic Web stands for a vision in which computers—software—as well as people can find, read, understand, and use data over the World Wide Web to accomplish useful goals for users."

Netcraft's Most Reliable Hosting Providers (September)

Netcraft just released their Most Reliable Hosting Providers survey for the month of September.



And the survey says:

"The dominant operating system was Windows, with six of the top most reliable sites running on a Microsoft operating system, evenly split between Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000."

While Netcraft's Web Server Survey clearly shows Apache Server as the clear choice for web server software and Microsoft trailing as a distant second, it appears that the Windows machines are more reliable to run that software on.



They did have to tweak the results this month due to the weather in Florida. Outages caused by hurricanes and floods are absent from the list, however Alabanza experienced a major outage due to an underground fire near its datacenter. The Alabanza fire disrupted service of 188,000+ hosts for about 2 days.

New Gmail Features

InsideGoogle reports of seeing new Gmail Features, but I am not yet. Nathan has observed the addition of Atom Feeds and Drafts and the Contacts List being moved into the main navigation on the left side.



The most surprising new feature that Nathan mentions, however, is the ability to set up automatic forwarding of your Gmail to another email inbox. Now this I will have to see for myself. That will really rock if it is true.



I am seeing conflicting reports on what the Atom Feeds really do. Nathan says, "You can now receive your new mail notifications in your RSS reader". But Steve Rubel is saying the feeds include a summary of each new message in your Google email. The screen grabs from Steve show a label with the title "News Feeds(6)".



It appears that you can use Gmail as a newsreader now. The feeds will show up in your labels section. If that is the case, then Google will have to do something about labels now -- like maybe add folders! They probably should have folders anyway. Labels are fine and dandy for "tagging" your mail, but folders would be handier for "sorting" your mail. Throw in newsfeeds and that just compounds the mess.