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.