TSS has launched a new section to the site, /blogs, which is designed to help you find the best blog entries written every day, chosen from over a thousand blogs.

Tracking what's going on in blog space is very difficult. Not only are there over a thousand blogs in the the Java community, but even within those blogs, entries tend to vary in quality. With our new /blogs service, TSS intends to do to blogs what we did to news - use human domain experts to spend hours a day sorting through the confusion to bring you a selection of the most useful blogs to read. We will spend hours a day doing this, so that you can get the best blogs in minutes.

TSS will continue to link to blogs that carry important news on TheServerSide.com (and .NET) homepages, but /blogs will carry other good blogs, such as those that stand out for being educational, thoughtful, informative, controversial, and of course, about Enteprise Java.

Our commitment to /blogs is that it will be focused on quality but also be comprehensive - if you find yourself relying on it to know what the best Enterprise Java blogs are, instead of spending hours sorting through feeds yourself, then our mission will have been accomplished.

Of course, we are not omniscient, so we encourage you to email us if you find good entries we missed. Eventually we would like to open /blogs to allow moderated user-submissions, like we do for news. There are also some limitations with our current first implementation, such as needing to rely on our forum system instead of a new infrastructure built-to-suit, but we hope you will find the offering interesting.

Kudos goes to javablogs.com - the first java blog aggregator. We like javablogs, but feel that applying that human touch that TSS did for news was an important service we had to deliver.

/blogs is updated independently of TSS.com's homepage, so please book mark /blogs, subscribe to it's RSS feed or subscribe to the new weekly blog update newsletter.

Enjoy,

TheServerSide Team.

Yes, but where's the RSS for this aggregate feed? Would be very useful!

Yes, but where's the RSS for this aggregate feed?

There's an XML Link in the top right corner for RSS.

I like the idea, but it'd be nice if you could send a trackback to the original blog, so bloggers would know they've been TSSed. Having a trackback listed on the original post would also help readers find additional comments posted on TSS.

Having a trackback listed on the original post would also help readers find additional comments posted on TSS.

Hmm.. in addition to the above, perhaps an ability to post a trackback against the news items also might be useful to indicate that that news item / thread has been blogged :) .

I tried sending an email to editor at theserverside dot com to suggest a blog as per the page. It bounced.

Email message included:
-------------------------------------------------------
Hi,
 
I want to suggest The Simple Thoughts Blog - http://blog.taragana.com/ for inclusion in your browsing list for your Blogs section - https://www.theserverside.com/blogs/index.tss
 
This blog focuses on Java and Web Technologies.
I am the author - http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/about-me/
 
If you are interested only in Java related content you can look in The Java Software Blog - http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/category/java/
 
Looking forward to hear your thoughts.
 
Best,
Angsuman
--------------------------------------------------------

Yeah, so did mine. Here's what I wanted to send:

Hello,

Good luck with your new blogs section! I would like to
suggest my blog, which can be found here :

http://www.jroller.com/page/wakaleo

It specialises in technical articles on Java and J2EE
subjects.

Best Regards,

John Ferguson Smart

This is a good service. Good show!

However, my mails to editor at theserverside dot com have also bounced back.

/a
http://apoorv.info

TSS has launched a new section to the site, /blogs, which is designed to help you find the best blog entries written every day, chosen from over a thousand blogs. ... TSS intends to do to blogs what we did to news - use human domain experts to spend hours a day sorting through the confusion to bring you a selection of the most useful blogs to read. ... but /blogs will carry other good blogs, such as those that stand out for being educational, thoughtful, informative, controversial, and of course, about Enteprise Java. ... Kudos goes to javablogs.com - the first java blog aggregator. We like javablogs, but feel that applying that human touch that TSS did for news was an important service we had to deliver.

I think this is likely to be really useful. I think both the strength and weakness of this offering is going to be the fact that is going to be moderated and filtered by humans.

I am not sure whether there is a specific set of guidelines or policies used for moderation and filtering. That might be a useful publication for blog authors, submitters / contributors and readers.

Personally I think javablogs has done a great service and is likely to continue to do so. However one of the issues I've found lately has been the information overload. Possibly /blog could work like the front page of the newspaper where you get all the most important news of the day upfront and quickly. Some readers would still perhaps want to scan all the articles using automatic blog aggregators just to find some more interesting nuggets that didnt make it to the front page.

Just wanted to say that this is an excellent idea/service!

  cheers,
  gerald

+1

This service aggregates the important blogs of the day,
and attracts the attension of the reader. Instead of jumping to serveral sites to find information, TSS brings these to you in one place.

Thanks, I like it

Chester

This is really great and complimentary to f.e. http://www.bloglines.com.

One thing that I would love to see would be syndication of the comments as well ie synchronization between comments posted on TSS/blogs for a blog article, and comments posted straight on the blog article on the author site.

This would be awesome. TSS could host all the comments in its hosting farms, as long as some magic include or macro in the blog does show the comments made on TSS.
Can someone do that ? no matter the blog engine ? I guess this is rather tricky.
Else comments will be splitted between each, or may only(mostly) happen on TSS.

Alex

Alex, that's a great idea. How could we go about implementing something like that? It seems like integration hell.

>>>Else comments will be splitted between each, or may only(mostly) happen on TSS.

We hope not. We see our blog section as one that will drive traffic to the best blog entries, we don't want to compete with them for comments or anything like that.

Floyd

Else comments will be splitted between each, or may only(mostly) happen on TSS.We hope not. We see our blog section as one that will drive traffic to the best blog entries, we don't want to compete with them for comments or anything like that.Floyd

Better make that very clear from the start for everyone, like some message on the top of the page, to avoid diverging comments from the original blogs, which would just create confusion.

Regards,
Henrique Steckelberg

Any reason why clicking on a link from the main Blogs listing takes you into a second page which contains the link to the actual blog. Kind of annoying to have to click through two links to get to the blog? Or am I missing something?

First of all, thanks. The little graphic is neat.

You know where this is all going though -- you do, or you don't?

TSS should now hire an IP-based radio service, and start broadcasting news + blogs.

I then tune my radio in the morning while in traffic and listen for the latest. :-) What? this is also an idea for a cartoon?? :-))