Catching up on your blogs, news, and sites is no simple matter – unless you have a RSS reader, that is. RSS feed readers combine all the stories you care about into one place and some, like Bloglines, help you find new feeds as well.
Bloglines is a RSS feed reader that breaks the feed managing task into tabs (feeds, blog, clippings, playlists, forums, search) but to get a grasp of what it can do, let’s begin with feeds. Under the Feeds tab two panels open up – the left to show you what your feeds are, and the right for the feed content. As we see items we are interested in we can clip them (save them for later), blog them, or click on the headline to open up the original story. Links for sorting, collapsing the feed to only titles, subscribing, and keeping the items new (so you will see it next time you open up the reader) are on the top of the panel.
Navigationally, Bloglines has divided everything into the tabs and links, but throws in hotkeys to speed your reading of the feeds. To offer another way to read the feeds Bloglines has made Playlists, a way to create custom lists of only the most important of your feeds, listing the headlines in list or glimpse view (grouped by feed in a headline list). For users that are looking to streamline their reading, but don’t want to lose their favorites, Playlists are a way of having a quick list and a full feed (Feeds). Heavy users may also want to be notified of new items in their feeds, for which there is a downloadable notifier (Mac, web, PC) that lets you know.
One of the interesting features of Bloglines is the ability to create a blog – either a private or public one – with clippings of the news items you think are important. If you like to share what you find with others this is an easy way to do so. Rather than clipping urls to stories and emailing them, just direct people to your blog url (bloglines.com/blog/username), or they can use your blog’s url to be up to date with everything you would like to share. You can also write your own posts or annotate the clips you’ve decided to post. To allow users to post to the blog remotely Bloglines also has added an email subscription feature that creates a temporary email to post on the blog. Anytime you want to post something on your blog, you email that address, and it is posted.
Most users will find the blog a useful alternative to Clippings, where users “clip” and save stories for later viewing. Bloglines also offers Clippings, as well as an easy link for emailing a feed item, but the ready accessibility of the public blog (and its annotations) make it a useful feature not only for sharing, but archiving.
To find new feeds Bloglines offers a search field (under the Search tab), where users can search by keywords for posts, feeds, citations, and the web, even creating a separate feed for the search. If you wanted to keep tabs on a specialized occupation, ostrich handling for example, creating a feed for the post search of ostrich handler would give you an up-to-the-minute tab on any instance of ostrich handling on the web. Users with preexisting feed accounts can easily import (or export) their feeds through a link under the Feeds tab.
Suggestions come in the form of a “related feeds” link in the reading pane and additional features on the navigation panel (Feeds, left side). The link for “Top 1000″ brings you the most popular feeds, the “Image Wall” brings you an ever changing post of pictures from the blogosphere, and the “Recommendations” link.
Bloglines’ flaw exists in the brevity of the capture from the RSS, which is not always the fault of Bloglines, but to counter the sometimes cryptic synopsis users are forced to click to the original source more often. That said, Bloglines is a capable reader which has a range of options for personal or group use. Users who find feeds as they browse the web will like the bookmarklet that can be put in the browser toolbar for quick feed adds, and site owners may like the Bloglines button to include their site in someone’s feed, or the blogroll script from Bloglines that lets users share their feeds. To find Bloglines, or other readers like it there is the Listio search: RSS+manage.
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