In late January, we first discussed RatingBurner (www.ratingburner.com), an interesting entry in the market, which helped rank blogs by their number of public FeedBurner RSS subscribers, and showed their day to day growth, both in aggregate numbers, and percentage increase. While Alexander Fedorov has been a little quieter than some other new entrants in the Web sphere, he has continued to update the site, adding new blogs daily, and inserting new features - including the debut of a new widget, which bloggers can use to show where they rank in RatingBurner's current standings.

While the value of ranking sites by their RSS count is the subject of some debate, in the absence of public, uncontested traffic and return visitor data, it is one metric available to nearly all major blogs, especially as FeedBurner has become the online standard for RSS delivery and tracking.

In the last few months, Fedorov wrote me to say, first, that support for branded feeds (i.e. not from feedburner.com) was added, and that feeds which point to subdomain of a blog but are still published with FeedBurner, can be added.

This might sound like a minor change, but this enabled sites like Engadget to be included. Engadget, which didn't figure in the first screen capture, now shows 1.6 million RSS readers, and even minute swings can show adds and drops of thousands per day. From January through today, you can also see TechCrunch increased from 654,000 readers to 782,000, and Mashable from 143,000 to 167,000.

As for me, at the time I clocked in with that post, I had 436 readers, and we're now seeing FeedBurner report 1,028 total.

Last week, Fedorov added a button for bloggers to post on their own site. As he wrote, the "button will automatically show a blog's ranking and when you click on it, you will be redirected exactly where they are sitting in the ranking."

For fun, I added mine to the site, and you can see my ranking (in the 400s) on the right side of louisgray.com. Does it add a ton of value? Not a lot, especially as you can consider to Rating Burner doesn't have the entire blogosphere indexed. But the database has grown dramatically since it first showed up in January, and it's always fun to see where you sit against your peers and competition, so if you're so inclined, it's real simple to add the button to your template. You can find out how on the RatingBurner Web site.

At the end of 2007, Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, stepped down, leaving the online career site behind and taking on a new job of his own, founding a stealth mode online social news site, called Social|Median. Months after raising less than $1 million in seed money from a number of angel investors, the site has risen from "dog food" mode to alpha, on the backs of an offshore engineering team in India and Jason's own efforts, seeing more than 500 early adopter users join the site, aimed at creating topical news networks and sharing hot news with friends. (See their blog here)

While the site has been in closed alpha stage for several months, I managed to snag 200 invites to Social|Median, with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)


Social|Median Has a Feed Showing Updates In Your Networks
Despite its alpha stage and so-far underdeveloped user interface, the site has already shown a number of interesting features that put it in line with similar services, from BlogRize to Yokway and to a lesser extent, FriendFeed.

The site bills itself as "a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information".The site's main hubs are its "News Networks", which are user created, whether on tech topics, including Apple, Web 2.0, Tech News or Venture Capital, or other interests, from History to Team Building and Triathlons. Users can join any number of news networks, effectively subscribing to view posted news on topics they find interesting. Some of the networks are quiet, seeing only five stories a day, while those more broad topics can see hundreds of new items in a 24-hour period.

New additions to the site include the ability to find news networks by searching the site, as well as new location-based news networks, for example, "Seattle", "Silicon Alley" or "Incredible India".

Also a unique wrinkle to Social|Median is an intelligent way for new News Networks to automatically grab the best sources around the Web for those items. Want a network on cars? It's like Social|Median will offer up Car and Driver, or if you can't get enough dirt on Google, Google Blogoscoped or Google Operating System would emerge.


You Can See Most Popular and Newest News Networks

There are two ways to add content to Social|Median, the first being a Twitter-like "Snip", where you can post your thoughts on any topic, or a "Clip", where you can post a headline, a URL to the story and any comments you have. Interestingly, Social Median does the hard work of using its algorithm to determine what are the appropriate news networks for your story, based on the submitted content, and that story can be listed in more than one network at a time.

A Social|Median user's front page consists of what's called the "Hot List", featuring relevant activities from people who are in your news networks, whether they've created new networks, added new clips, or commented on posted items. Soon, the site will also feature more analytics, including "most popular" stories in a network, and whether you want to see more or less from individual users, a lot like Facebook's "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" feature which encourages more or less of a specific item.

As with other social news sites, Social|Median isn't forcing you to be on their site 24 by 7 to get all the latest news. Users can get e-mail alerts of the top 5 most popular stories across Social|Median as frequently as three times a day, or less often if you don't want to see your e-mail in box go entirely social.


More E-mail from Social|Median, Please...

Goldberg's team is entirely based in Pune, India for now, working hard at coding and developing the site prior to its public launch, expected later this summer. Like FriendFeed's "Changelog", which shows the latest additions to the code, Social|Median is striving for a similar level of transparency. You can see the team's latest updates and code revisions on the product development blog found here: social|median: Product Development. As the site says frequently, it is in early alpha, and should be for those willing to accept a less-defined GUI in search for a more social way to share news and find new topics.

If you want in to Social|Median, you can start with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)

There are two major trends converging in the blogosphere. The first is the growth of sites dedicated to tracking shared items, and the second is, as Allen Stern from CenterNetworks called it, "the year of the friend". In this perfect storm around finding what your friends are reading, and learning new sources for content comes a new entrant: BlogRize, a site developed by Jesse Spaulding, a 26 year-old from Vancouver, Canada, who has built a new platform for blogs to grow their community, through seeing what their readers also like reading and sharing.


The louisgray.com BlogRize community in action
As Jesse writes, "BlogRize is today's news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs." BlogRize tracks items from two sources - a person's blog, and their Google Reader shared items. The two, in combination, are displayed as a person's "Community News", and each shared item has a number of activity options, from adding comments, to marking as "Interesting", "Funny" and "Insightful", or from the other perspective, "Lame", "Disagree" or you can even flag a post as having the "Facts wrong". You can also save stories for later reading.


My BlogRize profile shows recent activity and who I'm following
When joining BlogRize, you can start using the service by joining an individual blog's community, such as louisgray.com, techcrunch.com, or readwriteweb.com. By joining the community, those posts you find interesting from around the Web are integrated into that site's community news, where they are tabulated based on the number of shares, how often they were found interesting, and you can even see which friends found the same items intriguing that you did. Comments can be left on any item, and are highlighted.


Clicking through to an item shows who shared it or took action.
Interestingly, unlike some sites which rely on a large mass of users to get rolling, BlogRize doesn't need the wisdom of big crowds. As Jesse wrote me in an e-mail back in February, during early development of the site:

"Imagine a site like Digg where the entire community is made up of readers and fans of louisgray.com. But this is not an isolated community. Nope, BlogRize is an integrated site of many separate but interconnected blog "channels". So, there is not going to be a problem of the content stagnating due to a certain channel having a small subscriber base. In fact, our system is able to generate a HOT page of highly relevant links within a channel - even if that channel has zero subscribers. It can do this because it knows what keywords and what other blogs are most relevant to louisgray.com."

Jesse also noted Dave Winer's blog post on The next step in Digg clones as one source of inspiration. BlogRize users can build a Digg-like community just with the readers of a single blog, big or small. We also saw another entrant in this market debut just last week, with Yokway, as more and more frequently, bloggers are looking to share items with people they know or their peers, rather than with strangers.

To get started with BlogRize and join the louisgray.com community, sign up with the embedded invite code. If you have your own blog, you can claim it and start a new BlogRize.com community just for you.

Not being one of the Silicon Valley elite, I've always had a soft spot for "the little guy". I've acknowledged giving the smaller Web services more leeway in their offerings, and it wasn't all that long ago that I highlighted five potential entrants to future editions of the TechMeme leaderboard. But over the last few weeks, I've gotten more and more e-mail from blog readers asking me to help open their eyes to new sources who I'm reading who are contributing some great stories, but might not have a big enough megaphone.

Here are some of my newer favorites, in no particular order:

1) Charlie Anzman / SEO and Tech Daily (anzman.blogspot.com)

Focus: SEO, Analytics, Web 2.0
Recent Highlight: The A-list just changed and you're on it
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Hutch Carpenter / I'm Not Actually a Geek (bhc3.wordpress.com)

Focus: RSS, Facebook, Social Networking
Recent Highlight: The Best Blogs You're Not Reading? Toluu Knows
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Eric Berlin / Online Media Cultist ( onlinemediacultist.com)

Focus: Twitter, TechMeme, Online Media
Recent Highlight: What I Learned Friday Night on Twitter
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Mia Dand / Marketing Mystic (marketingmystic.typepad.com)

Focus: Technology, Blogging, M&A Activity and Social Media
Recent Highlight: Is Techcrunch the Rainmaker of the online world?
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Carlo Maglinao / TechBays (techbays.com)

Focus: Google, RSS, LinkedIn
Recent Highlight: Ten Power Tips on Facebook Usage
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Do you have five blogs you like that you think I don't know? Let me know in the comments, and we'll fill up on Google Reader.