My friend Bryan Hoff turned me on to something new and cool today: Bloglines. Sporting a clean and elegant interface, bloglines lets you read your RSS feeds (aka weblog subscriptions) via the Web rather than via a client-based application like NewsGator or NetNewsWire. Even better, you can allow other members of the bloglines community to access your subscriptions. And even better than that, you can then see who else subscribes to the same weblogs you’re reading!
And so, “hello!” to the five other people on this new service who read this weblog, the three others who read Attachment Parenting, and the other person who reads Real Life Debt: The Weblog. Since no-one yet subscribes to Dave Taylor’s Booktalk, I have this to say: check it out! And check out bloglines while you’re at it too.
Bloglines has been around for quite some time now. I have been using it for probably close to a year now and I’m sure it was around before that.
I found native clients like NewsGator to be annoying because if I wanted to read my RSS feeds at two locations, I would have to skip ones I have read before. With Bloglines, I can just breeze through whenever I want and not worry about if I have read an entry before or not.
Plus, Mark Fletcher and his group have been making improvements on a regular basis so that there are new features at least once a month. The latest being the number of references to a story you are looking at from other Blogs spidered by Bloglines.
I can’t imagine ever using anything other than Bloglines ever again.
To the commenting Dave above – just to clarify something. 🙂 If you use Newsgator for Outlook with NewsGator Online Services, you can enable synchronization so you won’t have to read the same content in multiple locations. So you can use multiple copies of Outlook, or you can use Outlook in one location and our browser-based interface in another.
Thanks for adding your info, Greg. Greg’s the genius behind Newsgator, and he’s absolutely right: Newsgator is far beyond the myopic app + subscription list that most other RSS feeders are trapped in. Well worth checking out.