I've been playing with Blogtoaster a bit lately. It's a fairly simple - and thus elegant - tool. Basically, you register with the MSN IM entity a set of WebLogs which ping weblogs.com to watch, and it sets a notify to your MSN IM account when they update.

It thus, of course, is a bit dependent on two entities - the blogToaster service (provided by Simon Fell) and the weblogs.com service as provided by UserLand.

Note that there's also a jabber oriented version of the same service model.

note: Mike Whybark somewhat correctly points out the availability of Blogrolling, which is similar - it provides a quick and easy way to list out sidebar entries, and - being live and javascript drive, can drive visitors to your website an autmatic notification that links you're interested in may have been updated. This is comparable, but not quite the same. In the Blogtoaster model, I choose that I want to be notified of updates. In the Blogrolling model, I passively choose to tell my visitors of these updates. Both have worth, and I've already started toying with the Blogrolling stuff this past weekend.

My essential concern - though these are often light bandwidth services to provide, they are still not free for the providers. How this economy sorts out shall be interesting.

Posted by esinclai at July 02, 2002 05:39 AM |