[Sweet. I use a Caedmon's lyric as an allusive title, then talk about nothing involving them.]

I just had an idea based loosely on the house cleaning concept … a “rainy_day” tag for feeds. Y’know, feeds that I’d sit down and read if I had a rainy day. Many feeds like this, I find that I’ve subscribed for two reasons:

1. I’ve consistently seen other sites I like have some nuggets pulled from their archives.
2. I subscribed to them because of that, or from boredom, or to broaden my horizons, or because I’m interested in that subject when I have idle time.

But if I tag them “rainy_day”, and it’s sunny outside, I can scroll down to rainy_day, highlight the tag, wait a few seconds, then hit “Mark All As Read”, and go back on about my business.

This is the “a_list” idea in reverse, really. If there’s something really good in the “rainy_day” pile, chances are that someone I read is going to point to it, because it’ll be a rainy day for them. And if it’s sunshiny for all of us … well, too bad. I only have so much time in my day.

Just tossing that bit of meat out there for any interested.

I like Alex’s concept of cleaning house. With my participation in the Blogathon and the attendant lack of sleep/coherence after the fact, I opened up FeedLounge this morning to almost 1000 unread items. Something said, “PURGE!” So, I’ve been whittling through the list, and I’m finding that I’m purging some stuff.

Now, what I’d like FeedLounge to do for me is to note the number of manual reads—that is, me clicking on an item, looking at it, and FL marking it read for me—versus the number of times where I skim a list and then hit Mark All As Read. Because … some algorithm of that is going to tell me where some value lies, and that value has value to me.

And yes, that’s an Attention kind of thing.

And no, I haven’t talked with Alex about this. He might wrap a tire iron around my neck when he reads this, for all I know.

I had to dive into FeedLounge to get some information that I want to post later today … and I’ve come out alive.

I did note, however, that Kevin Burton’s now taken notice of FeedLounge. Welcome to the world of people who are FL-aware, Kevin.

Alex and Scott have grown FeedLounge to the point where they have inducted a third wave of alpha users. From the first wave, I welcome you. [Especially Stephen.]

For everyone who’s never used a Web-based aggregator before, I’ve got to talk about polling for a second. No shared aggregator is ever going to be able to poll feeds as often as you’d like them polled. Any shared-services aggregator is going to poll no more often than every thirty minutes, as that seems to be the industry standard that everyone’s come to in terms of how often a feed should be polled by a single resource.

Now, FeedLounge is set up to use an algorithm for its polling schedule that, in my mind, does the job:

• We take the average time between posts for each feed and update the feed at twice that interval. If a feed has a new item every 8 hours, we update the feed every 4 hours. New feeds are updated every 4 hours until the average posting time is determined.
• No feed is updated more often than every 30 minutes.
• No feed is updated less frequently than every 48 hours.

To my way of thinking, that scales better than the way that, presently, BlogLines chooses to update their feeds, polling hourly. Feeds that are updated more frequently—say, Gizmodo—will show new items to you more often. For those high-volume feeds, you’ll actually be fresher than Bloglines.

For feeds that post far less frequently—like, say, GFMorris.com—the polling may only happen every 48 hours. Does this mean that you won’t always be on the bleeding edge with these feed sources? Yes. But when you consider the bandwidth we’re saving FeedLounge is saving, not only on their part but on the part of the independent content producers, we’re doing everyone a favor.

While this might be a letdown for some of you, especially those of you coming from a client-side aggregator where you’re used to feeds being polled on demand, it’s a design decision that simply must be made. Alex and Scott, however, have made a number of other design decisions that are really exciting and just as intelligent as their feed-polling algorithm. Those are the features that I think that you’ll really enjoy.

Any system is going to have tradeoffs and boundary cases. It’s my hope—because I want to see FeedLounge succeed—that you’ll understand and appreciate those tradeoffs and enjoy the service for what it is and what it can become. I know that I’m a very happy FeedLounger; I’ve been using it for six weeks, and I can’t even begin to remember what my old feed-reading workflow was.

Alex notes that FeedLounge’s alpha is now running on its own dedicated box, and man … it’s fast.

In talking about building up FeedLounge’s infrastructure, Alex talks about the fact that there’ll be a free and a paid version of FeedLounge. I think he’s wondering aloud a little about how many people will pay for it, pointing to Stephen O’Grady, who’s on record saying that he’ll pay for FeedLounge. Alex, make that two of us.

Back in my Feed on Feeds days, I’d topped out at a little over 300 feeds aggregated regularly. [Okay, 323.] Now, using FeedLounge, I’m at 351 and growing.

FoF wasn’t scaling for me, both in its aggregation [it often caused CPU spikes and would hang mercilessly] and in its ability to let me sift through the aggregated results quickly and easily. The thing with power aggregating in 2005 is this: you’re going to pull in a lot of stuff that you really don’t care about. That’s because feeds are generally released by content producers, and content producers are never going to publish stuff that you’re 100% interested in. [The exception to that rule might be personal sites of close friends, but even then, my friends sometimes write about things that just don't interest me.]

But an aggregator that allows you to view new items in multiple ways will allow you to cross-section the information you’re aggregating in as many ways, and the end result is that you’re left with a better experience.

My experience is far more than just 9% better [in terms of feeds aggregated]. It’s probably … 50% better, at a minimum. So good that, in fact, I just dumped Feed on Feeds from my box. Bye bye, my lovely 10MB feed items datastore…

I didn’t check my feeds at all yesterday, so when I walked into Ye Olde FeedLounge this morning, I figured it’d take me a couple hours to dig through it all. Nope. I had 249 unread items, and I was through them in under 90 minutes—half of what that normally would’ve taken me to do in FoF—and that doesn’t count the time I took to post on the Rumor Forum, or going to the breakroom to refill my water, or …

I think the point is made—despite being an alpha Ajax application and all the bits that means [occasionally slow loads, some unoptimized Javascript that makes Gecko gack a bit]—that FeedLounge makes me more efficient in reading all the feeds I subscribe to, and besides that, the experience is far, far more enjoyable.

It’s all I can do right now not to make myself delete FoF…

Two things I’m really, really loving about Feedlounge:

1. Tagging feeds. As Dougal notes, you can tag feeds to give you clouds of feeds. He uses the “perl programming” “php programming” example, which really should be accompanied by a sexy little Venn diagram or something. It makes slicing up your feeds from one large monstrosity into smaller chunks easier to handle. Now, filing/categorization is something that desktop feed readers have had for some time, and I reckon that Bloglines has had it as well, but tagging allows stuff to go in multiple widgets. Heck, right now, when a feed breaks, I can tag it “broken” and have Alex and Scott look at it.
2. Renaming feeds. I adore this: I read enough feeds [~325 as of this writing, and that number is bound to grow now that I have a better tool!] that I can’t always map a name to a domain name or Weblog title. Now, I can go in there and rename “mezzoblue” to “Dave Shea“. See, because in my mind, these aren’t faceless Weblogs—they’re the thoughts and words and hearts of people out there on the Web. I want to remember those names, and FeedLounge lets me.

Oh, and another thing to love: FeedLounge uses Mark Pilgrim’s feedparser. No more Postel’s Law concerns for me out here in the feed-reading world.

More FeedLounge babble in the coming days, to be sure…

After a little over a day of using FeedLounge, some more thoughs …

1. I’m really not kidding when I say that I’m killing my Feed of Feeds installation. Just as soon as this thing is out of beta, I’m canning it. I might even stop supporting it on my box entirely. There’s gonna be a free version of FeedLounge, and it’ll support most anyone’s needs. FoF has been really hurting my server lately, as its queries were really spiking the CPU when I was trying to aggregate a lot of feeds. I had to take it off of background updating every half-hour just to keep from having to reboot Apache and MySQL all the time.
2. I’ve quickly grokked most of the keyboard shortcuts. I still like to click on stuff, but I’m using the keyboard about 1/3 to 1/2 the time, which is about standard for me in any application, thin client or thick.
3. The quick nature of how Alex and Scott respond to bug reports and minor feature requests is astounding. Now, I know that some of the stuff we’re reporting is stuff they knew about in part, but still … to borrow a line from the PGA, “These guys are good.
4. I love, love, love to be able to rename and tag my feeds. It soothes my organizational tendencies. I’ve got a filing approach for tagging feeds; I’m sure that I’ll be more of a cloud user when tagging items. [Confused? See Gene Smith on Filing v. Annotative Tagging or Clay Shirky on Tag Sets Bad, Tag Clouds Good, both on Tagsonomy.com.]

I’ll be snaring screenshots at the office tomorrow [this machine at home is too puny to make Photoshop a non-frustrating experience] for my alpha-period review.

Okay, so I’m one of the lucky bastards that’s a part of the invite-only alpha for FeedLounge. [That's what I was hinting at last night.]

Let me give you my first-day-using thoughts, of which there are three:

1. OMFG, THIS IS AWESOME!!!
2. I often forget that I am in a browser. Like, all the time. When tagging a feed, I am prone to mouse-over the feed in the left pane and right-click, like I expect that to do something. I’m doing this all the bloody time. Alex and Scott have done it—one of the highest class of Web applications where you forget you’re in a browser. It’s … crazy.
3. Feed on Feeds? What’s that again? About ten minutes after Alex pinged me yesterday to dump my OPML into FL and then start using it, I was ready to uninstall FoF. This is like going from a go-kart to a BMW.

More effusive praise (and screenshots!) later … I still have a lot of feeds to tag, items to mark read, and the like. If you IM me today, expect me to be very distracted as I lose myself in FL.