We’ve just released a directory and aggregator site for blogs, podcasts, and news sites that focus on multi-touch technologies. Since we began to develop our own Multi-Touch table last summer, our interest in the topic has grown. Like the Museum Blogs and Museum Podcasts directory sites, Multitouch Blogs is open to new submissions from the community. This site is powered by our own RSS Mixer technology. 

The idea of the directory is to raise awareness and increase the authority of sites focusing on multi-touch design and technology. Multitouch Blogs creates a combined RSS feed and there is a Web widget with links to individual posts and blogs.  There is also an OPML file with links to each of the sites in the directory. Many blogging platforms support OPML and it can be used to create a quick blog roll.  We hope to see the directory grow over the next few months.

The Museum Blogs directory site has been revised and relaunched. We have also added a companion site, Museum Podcasts (www.museumpodcasts.org). Both of these directory and aggregator sites are powered by our own RSS Mixer technology.  The posts, episodes and information about each contributing blog or podcast come directly from their respective RSS feeds. The directories are updated about every hour. 

Museum Blogs and Museum Podcasts have integrated widgets for viewing all posts and episodes in the directory. In addition, there is a ”detail” page for each blog and podcast each with its’ own individual widgets.  All of these widgets can be freely cut-and-pasted into other Websites or blogs. Both directories accept new blogs and podcasts, so if you have any additions please send them along.

A serious hardware issue at the beginning of the month, sped up our decision to end the public alpha for RSS Mixer. For those of you who used the service, we sincerely apologize for the abrupt end to the free service. The site had nearly 47,000 feeds and over 4 million posts in the database.

We’re currently rethinking the future of the public site and we may make service available again sometime in the future. In the meantime, we are still using it to power the Museum Blogs directory site, we also see it as key element for our new multi-touch tables, download movies, and for the Open Exhibits proposal. We’ll keep you posted as to our future plans for RSS Mixer.

Back in the spring of 2006 we launched MuseumBlogs.org, a directory and blog-feed aggregator. The site was essentially a WordPress “hack” and over time its’ performance began to suffer as the number of blogs and feeds grew exponentially. Lately the site has been struggling under the weight of 300+ blogs and nearly a quarter million posts. Since our release of RSS Mixer in September we’ve been looking to replace the old Museum Blogs system with a more scalable aggregator.

Since a mix of feeds contains the same information that the directory site had originally (blog title, description, thumbnail, and posts) all we needed to do was create a “structure” for putting this “mix” information into a new site. Take a look at Museum Blogs and you’ll see a few differences, we updated the design a bit while we made the larger structural changes to the site. The main difference is much better performance. The site is truly powered by RSS Mixer–as changes are made to the mix they are reflected in the Museum Blogs site.

One drawback of the new site is that blogs that don’t have properly formatted RSS or Atom feeds no longer appear. This has effectively removed about 70 blogs from the original directory. However, these blogs weren’t aggregated in first place, as the old Word Press system couldn’t read those feeds either.

Beyond much better performance, a major benefit of the new system is that we can take advantage of some of the features of RSS Mixer.  Take a look at the Museum Blogs mix, you can get an OPML file, Widgets (Apple, Web, Vista, Yahoo!), and a mobile version of the mix which contains 274 blogs.  We hope to integrate some of these features directly into the Museum Blogs site in the future.

For now we’ve archived the old Museum Blogs site (pictured above) which contains an aggregated collection of 224,093 posts. We’re not quite sure what to do with this historic archive, it may not be worth saving as it contains only partial posts and the majority of the original blogs are still available. We welcome your comments or questions about both the new and the old Museum Blogs directory.

Along with looking at Google analytics, Google crawl stats, and other server-based statistics we’ve been tracking RSS Mixer’s Alexa Ranking. The figures we see on Alexa are certainly encouraging, even at this early date. (RSS Mixer has been out there for less than a month.)  Yesterday, RSS Mixer was ranked the top 23,527 site in the world on Alexa. With literally hundreds of millions of Websites out there we’re very pleased to see this.

Alexa Rankings are determined by data sent from users who have the Alexa Toolbar and “other diverse traffic data sources.” It is a somewhat imperfect from a statistical point of view–it is not as accurate as server-side statistics.  Still, Alexa does provide the ability to roughly compare the popularity of various sites.  There’s more about Alexa Rankings on their site.

The other statistical information we have indicates the same strong growth for RSS Mixer. Over the next few months, we’ll see if can be sustained.

The public alpha for RSS Mixer has now been up for a week. The site started out with around 18,000 feeds in the directory. These were added over the last year, since the launch of the initial prototype last summer. The count now stands at 24,000–a relatively large increase for our first week. This total number of feeds translates into nearly 3 million posts in the RSS Mixer directory.

A mention in Mashable! (RSS Mixer Makes Mashup Easier), along with a number of mentions in China (most notably Web Share 2.0) and a post in a Spanish language blog (Geeks Room) among others–helped add nearly 3,000 feeds in just 24 hours. Things have slowed down a bit since, but we are still serving up a lot of pages and supporting an ever-increasing number of widgets and feeds.

When the prototype site went live last year, we were swamped and the site was crushed by spikes in traffic. This time around the structure of the application and the database is much improved.  Not only can we handle the load, the time it takes to deliver pages is vastly improved. Take a look at the chart below from Google Crawl stats. This shows how Googlebot (which indexes pages) has spidered the RSS Mixer site over the last 90 days. You’ll notice as the Alpha site replaced the prototype there is a huge spike in activity, as new pages are added to Google. Check out the bottom graph and you’ll see the download time fall off the chart!

This drop-off shows the performance improvement in RSS Mixer. Of course, if we continue to add 6,000 feeds and approximately 750,000 post every week–we’ll have to revisit our site structure in the coming months.

Mashable! (the #13 ranked blog in the world, according to Technorati) has just written a very positive article about RSS Mixer. Our launch last week competed with Google’s Chrome release, so it has taken a while for the story to get out there. (The lesson here is never release anything when Google has got something new to share.)

In the article, the writer, Doriano “Paisano” Carta, goes through many of RSS Mixer’s features including; widget output, OPML support, and the Firefox Add-on. After all the work, Ideum has put into the site over the last year, it was nice to see positive comments like this one…

“It is extremely easy to mix and mashup many RSS Feeds in no time at all. The interface is well-designed and helps make the process very simple.”

There’s more at Mashable! see RSSMixer Makes Mashups Easier,

Update: You can listen to the story at Pimp My News!

If you have a Twitter account, you probably already have blog, a Facebook page, a Flickr account, a YouTube account along with other points of presence on the Web. For many of our museum clients, managing this extended presence with limited resources is a constant challenge. So anything that comes along that makes this process easier is of great interest.

This week we created a Twitter site for RSS Mixer. I wanted to find a way to help keep this Twitter site up-to-date without having to manually enter every update. I came across TwitterFeed which takes your RSS Feed and automatically posts updates to Twitter. It is simple to use and while it isn’t a replacement for manually adding updates, it certainly helps and saves you having to manually update every blog post to Twitter.

The RSS Mixer site is now available! The new alpha release has a ton of new features, a new database structure, and it is running on our own custom-built, dedicated servers. Here’s a brief description of the site from our press release…

RSS Mixer (www.rssmixer.com) is a free service that allows visitors to efficiently mix multiple Web feeds into one. The mixed feed is then viewable as a new RSS feed, Web page, and mobile (iphone) formatted page. All mixes and feeds in RSS Mixer are also available in 5 widget formats: Apple Dashboard Widget, Yahoo! Desktop Widget, Google Gadget, Vista Desktop Widget, and as an embeddable Web widget. There’s even a Media Player Web widget that plays mixed audio and video podcasts.

We have built RSS Mixer to (hopefully) handle whatever comes our way.  For example, I just posted a mix containing over 400 podcast feeds from an OPML file.  All the feeds were added and mixed in a just a couple of minutes. While site is still alpha and we’ll likely have to work out some issues, we’re happy to finally have it publicly available. Thanks to everyone who helped test the private preview releases earlier this year. We’ll post more updates as the site continues to develop.

Update: We suspended the RSS Mixer service in late 2008.

Last July, we posted a prototype Web application, RSS Mixer that allowed anonymous visitors to mix RSS (and Atom) feeds together. Back then the page got a lot of notice. There was a blog post from Mashable, one from CNET’s Webware, a brief article in Brazil’s largest newspaper, and literally hundreds of other links from all over the world. The prototype site continues to get traffic and it will surpass 5,000 user-generated mixes and added 10,000 feeds any day now.

Next month, we’ll be releasing a new version of RSS Mixer. The alpha version will still allow for anonymous mixing, but registered (free) users will be able save and edit their mixes. A new and vastly improved feed mixer will update RSS and Atom feeds quickly, pulling images and other rich media. A number of other improvements including enhanced language support, full search, tagging, feed statistics and ranking, and many others will all be part of the package. We will announce the release date in early February. Update: We will be releasing the new version of RSS Mixer this summer.