Blern Blog

What’s going on in Blern-land? It might appear that not much is happening, but what’s really going on is a big rewrite of some of the behind-the-scenes functionality of Blern. There’s a few parts of Blern that aren’t visible to users that have been begging for a tune up so that’s where my attention has gone recently. However, I expect these changes to actually make it easier for Blern to support more new 3rd-party sites to learn from. So keep watching!

Oh yeah… In case you missed it, check out this highlight of Blern on shegeeks.net.

Fear not, Blern devotees. Although things are relatively quiet here on the blog, a number of “behind the scenes” improvements have been getting attention, such as ways to improve the accuracy of your recommendations and new methods for detecting and incorporating new RSS feeds–the current total of “active” feeds is nearly at 10,000 (if this seems low, consider that I review the content and appropriateness of every feed that’s made “active” in the system).

I’ve been reluctant to try turning Blern into a social networking site, which seems to be all the rage in every Web 2.0 site out there. However, I’m beginning to see some applications where it might make sense to have some “social” features. Rather than build a new social network, I’d rather leverage technologies out there so I’ll be looking at things like OpenSocial and Facebook integration, where it makes sense.

Specifically, I’m thinking about a feature that would allow you to gauge how closely your interests align with those of your friends and discover people who have similar interests to you. I’m laying the groundwork to incorporate some more “traditional” features in Web 2.0 sites (such as integrating an address book for sharing articles). This foundation should allow me to then take the next step of autodiscovering the interests of your friends and then measuring the similarity between them, yourself and possibly others.

Well, after much troubleshooting and work I’ve finally managed to get the site migrated over to the new hardware. All has been running for over a week now without incident so I’m happy with the results. Hopefully more than a few of you have noticed the improved performance.

Today Blern enjoys a completely revamped site design. Since day one, this has been an important objective with Blern and it has finally been implemented. There’s no doubt that the old colors, layout and overall design was lacking, to put it politely. I hope you enjoy the new site layout as much as I do. Please check it out!

Of course, I’d love to hear your feedback on the new layout. Got comments, suggestions or ideas? Comment here or Contact Us!

In the beginning, there was the web… and the web provided a virtually limitless selection of articles on virtually limitless topics. Many found sites that sometimes provided content that was interesting to them. However, as time wore on and the web grew boundlessly, the number of sites which may contain interesting news and insights grew unmanageable.

Then came RSS… and now there was a way to quickly skim the content of dozens, even hundreds, of websites in a single sitting, searching for those articles that might be of interest. But what of the articles and blog entries posted to sites you’d never heard of? Or those on sites that normally aren’t interesting and worth skimming? And still, all that time spent skimming through uninteresting content trying to find the stuff you want to read…

Finally, came Blern… a site that scours thousands of websites, constantly looking for the articles you’ll find interesting. How does it work? You simply tell Blern which articles were interesting–or uninteresting– and Blern figures out what you are interested in. It’s sort of like your friend, who knows you are into poker who comes across an interesting poker article and points it out to you. You tell Blern you like articles and blog entries on poker and Blern finds you more articles on poker. And if you’re really into poker, you can subscribe to the work “poker” itself, and see every article with the word poker that Blern comes across.

Blern is new so there may be a kink here or there that needs to be worked out. New features are always in the works, as well. But if you have thoughts or ideas about your experience with Blern, I encourage you to provide feedback.

Welcome to Blern!