Bloglines inks deal with parcel carriers to track deliveries

Search engine Ask Jeeves has added a new raft of features to its Bloglines service. Users are now able to access the service to track the progress of their deliveries from the world’s biggest courier services.

Among the companies included in the parcel tracking service are FedEx, UPS, and the US Postal Service. The service is not limited to the United States, but will also track international shipments.

Bloglines is Ask Jeeves’ free online service that organises a host of disparate content scattered through news feeds and blogs. Rather like a news reader will organise subscribed news groups, Bloglines manages the business of searching, subscribing, creating and sharing web content.

Currently Bloglines users can access: news sources, newsgroup postings from Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups, photo blogs, audio podcasts and video blog content. There are also Saved Searches that persistently watch for and retrieve new blog conversations and news feed articles. Ask Jeeves says that Bloglines holds an index of more than 370 million blog and news feed articles in seven languages.

With the move towards what might be called more practical applications, Ask Jeeves says that its intention it to move Bloglines beyond aggregating general-audience blogs and RSS news feeds. Going forward it wants to allow subscribers to ‘receive updates that are personal to their daily lives.’ As such, the company aims to add more personalised services in the near future including local weather updates and share prices.

Last week Ask Jeeves was sold for $1.85 billion to US entrepreneur Barry Diller. At the time, Mr Diller said he wanted to make the company one of the biggest on the internet. while the news in this announcement is likely to have predated the sale, the company is clearly looking to improve its stickiness with users. As with the other big search engines the company sees a future in creating its own community of users.