Part of the reason for this has to do with the relatively non-intuitive way that RSS feeds are added to RSS readers for end users. And part of it is due to the rise of social media applications for information sharing (read: Twitter, Facebook) and the real time web.

So where does that leave things heading into 2010? The consensus of the blogosphere is, well, a muddled one.

ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus reported late last month that the RSS Reader market is in disarray but then dialed back and returned with 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock. Venture Chronicles bluntly states that "RSS as a standard has failed to evolve in ways that solve publisher problems." And Louis Gray (rightly) points out that "the current discussion around RSS being less useful, or less important, than in years past, is flawed, period."

With the web, one thing that we know is that things are forever changing, and usually more quickly as opposed to less. So it is with RSS as well, and one thing we know for sure is that the use of RSS will evolve based on patterns affecting the social web, the real time web, and so on.

Allen Stern's smart takeaway is that the era of full RSS feeds may be ending because online publishers can now effectively promote themselves without "giving away" full content via RSS. Personally, as a heavy Google Reader user, this would not bother me all that much as I often click through to the stories that I take the time to read end-to-end.

Meanwhile, I still see huge potential and opportunity of Google Reader as a content sharing and social media tool. At its best, the shared and shared + note features offer the an ideal combination of "smart social network" and "smart content aggregator." And no doubt Mother Google will have more in store for us this year.

Finally, it just occurred to me: if Google had acquired FriendFeed rather than Facebook, would the RSS landscape look significantly different today?

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

It’s okay if you don’t. I’ve mentioned the blog directory/search engine to a few dialed in friends recently and received blank stares. At one time it was a pretty big deal though, at least within the bourgeoning blogospheric community during the middle of this decade.

The search and ranking system were always a little bit wonky, but what I loved about TTLB was its blogosphere ecosystem page. Beyond the fact that I’ve always been obsessed with rankings and statistics and numbers, TTLB did a few things really really well.

• Its ecosystem mimicked the real ecosystem – On the “lower” or less popular end, blogs are ranked into broad groupings such as Insignificant Microbes, Multicellular Microorganisms, and Wiggly Worms. Rankings are based on “the number of incoming links [blogs] receive from other weblogs on the list.” As blogs increase links and influence they “evolve” into categories such as Crawly Amphibians, Slithering Reptiles, and Marauding Marsupials. The most popular blogs according to TTLB take on lofty titles such as Playful Primates, Mortal Humans, and, at the very top, Higher Beings. I love the tongue-in-cheek titles and think that they did a great job of parsing the blogosphere into relative categories. A TechCrunch or DailyKos really is a “higher being” as compared to a blog with eight visitors a day, you know?

• It provided a daily snapshot of the growing blogosphere – I used to visit TTLB every day (particularly to see where Blogcritics was sitting in the mix), and it was interesting to watch the leading “higher beings” of the time flip flop rankings with one another. The overall trend was explosive growth. Back in the day, I kept an eye on the 100,000 page view mark (they used to use estimated page views as a main metric) and noted how achieving that milestone placed you relatively lower on the list as more and more blogs started to see serious traffic.

• It gave a quick snapshot of The Powers That Be – While I’m sure a few major players were missing, keeping an eye on TTLB allowed you to quickly know who really mattered in the blogosphere each day. Daily Kos, Instapundit, Gawker, and Boing Boing were then as now megapowers.

• It provided an early read on trends – Checking out TTLB over time revealed some interesting trends, including the rise of gossip blogs and the voracious appetite for gossipy content (which continues today of course) and the explosion of blog networks such as b5media and SB Nation.

What’s up with TTLB today? That’s a good question. I vaguely recall that it went through regular service outages some years ago, and at some point dropped out of my daily rotation. A bit of research doesn’t reveal much, though a few people seem to concur that TTLB is sadly “dead” or at least has been cast adrift for a good long while. (The current rankings don't seem to make a lot of sense and site blog hasn't been updated in nearly two years.)

The march to provide quality blog rankings goes on, of course. Today, Alexa and Compete and others are striving to provide the best and most comprehensive Internet-wide rankings and stats, while Technorati is a major player in the blog ranking space.

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Twelve people have been killed and 31 wounded in a shooting spree at a Texas military post in a murderous rampage that officials believe was carried out by an Army psychiatrist.

The suspected gunman was identified by ABC News as Major Nadal Malik Hasan. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, told Fox News that military sources informed her that the gunman was about to be deployed to Iraq. Sources tell ABC News that this would have been his first deployment.

Twitter has become a central focus for communication, link sharing, information dissemination, and on the ground reporting during breaking news stories, so tech bloggers are looking at how Twitter is being used tonight. MG Siegler at TechCrunch speculates about how Twitter is influencing its Trending Topics feature to bring breaking news stories to the forefront immediately. “And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand,” Siegler writes.

And Adam Ostrow at Mashable discusses how Twitter’s new Lists feature is already getting high profile use focused on this story by such outlets as The New York Times, The Today Show, and The Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, on the political and current events side of the blogosphere, updates are being discussed and hashed over as new information arises. Talking Points Memo titles a post very succinctly: This is Going to Get Very Dark.

(this piece originally appeared on Technorati)

The last few months have seen a lot of exciting developments, not least of which is that I’m the blogging channel editor at Technorati these days. So not only am I reunited with my old crew at Blogcritics (I joined Blogcritics in ‘04, became Executive Producer and co-owner until I left in the fall of ‘07, and Blogcritics was acquired by Technorati the following year, making this an achingly long and perhaps award-winning in-parentheses addendum!), I’m also amped to be working with the Technorati crew, who are all very very cool as well.

The timing was lucky in that I got to participate in the annual State of the Blogosphere report by doing a bunch of interviews with bloggy experts and influencers, and have been writing a good bit, editing, and strategizing on social media promotion. It’s been a fun time, and am very excited to see how far we can take our new original content effort.

I was going to link to a bunch of the pieces I’ve written over there but instead I’ll just highlight interviews with Steve Rubel and Penelope Trunk for SOTB, and a few “blog focus” columns that I’ve run, such as on the Twitter Lists widget, malware scam that scammed Gawker Media, and the Cheezburger Network Empire.

Here’s my profile page if you’d like to check out more. I’ll try to repost things over here as time allows, and fire up my Posterous operation again, which has gone into the weeds of late I’m afraid.

If you’d like to write for Technorati, check this out.