RS: Blogsnow does what no other blog content aggregator does. It shows us the most popular links for a particular source/database? In non-technical terms, how does it work?

AW: Those views are based on where people link to. Lets take the imdb as an example which is an amazing resource. Blogsnow simply notes which blog recently added a link to any of its pages. The internet is brimful with great sites that provide allot of valuable information. Those topic based views try to combine this with the authorship of millions of bloggers. The results vary as much as the contents do.

RS: What is your criteria for picking resources to display results?

AW: A content based view like imdb or google searches must reflect what is going on. Those top 50 lists should express what is a topic that people care about. And its results must be robust. Future trends should be equally well displayed. Since blogsnow is so new, the verdict on this still open. It might be that some views may disappear in the future, if they stop returning interesting results. Topic views are based on what I am curious about. blogsnow contains a set of raw data. When there is something in it on a given subject/target site, then I try to generate a topic view for it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The beauty is, that I play with this quickly. The data is already there, I just need to filter it right to get there.

RS: I understand that you ping the most popular weblog change databases, such as weblogs.com and blo.gs. Do you only grab information from the blog posts or from the blogrolls (favorites links) as well?

AW: Blogsnow only follows ping lists. This has also the advantage that blogsnow sees only blogs, that people like to make public. Allowing people to ping blogsnow directly is a topic that is high on my to do list.

RS: How much work do you have to put into creating each list? How much is manual labor?

AW: It really depends on the list. Some are easy, others take a bit more work. A couple of hours I would guess. To write the code is very manual labor, but then it just runs. Or, at least it should. Click over for part 2 of the interview.

I just realized that my first inclination is to read "blogsnow" as "Blog Snow," which is kind of cool, but confusing.