I wrote a few days ago about RSS basics, and news aggregators. Child in Time brought Bloglines to my attention, and I liked the idea of it, so I gave it a try.

Bloglines is a free web based news aggregator, feed reader, or whatever you want to call rss readers. It was easy to get started. I signed up, got my email validation, and uploaded my *.opml list of subscriptions from Radio Userland and Awasu in no time.

It's a two pained interface with a feed list on the left and content of the selected feed displayed on the right-hand paine. The first thing I noticed was Memepool was not up to date. I'm not sure why, other feeds seemed to be up to date. Then I noticed that after I selected a feed, all items were immediately marked as read. In the two other aggregators I have experience with (Radio/FM Radio being the other) let you take each item in a feed individually. That way I can read only a few and leave others to be read later. I'm not sure if this is a big deal, but it was surprising.

There isn't a lot more to Bloglines. You can turn a feature on to let you share your feeds (with your own blog and others) You can install (windows only) an app that lets you know when you have new content. And there is a tool that makes it easier to add to your subscriptions while surfing.

Bloglines is to Awasu as Hotmail is to Outlook - sort of...

Here is the idea I had while exploring Bloglines.

Radio Userland is a web server on your local machine. It has a  feed reader. FM Radio is - in part - a desktop feed reader that uses Radio's subscription list, as it's own. Bloglines is a web based feed reader. By combining features of all three - desktop news reader with web based feed list storage, you'd have the best of both worlds. Much like I use Yahoo Web Mail and Outlook together. Yahoo is great when I'm not at my own computer, but when I am at my own computer I like the tools and speed that Outlook has.

This could be done in a very clugy way, by automatically posting an elaborate feed list, complete with items on a seperate web page, but it wouldn't really allow you to manage you're subscriptions when you're at another computer.

Instead of a desktop feed reader maintaining it's subscription list on my harddrive, it could synchronize with a subscription list which is stored on the web and accessible through an interface much like Bloglines. 

10:34:24 PM    

I can't stress this enough. RSS has put so much coherency into my relationship with the world wide web. It makes my time on the web 90% more effective. What is RSS? How do I use RSS? Well, I think pretty highly of it, so I'll write down what I know.

RSS might stand for Really Simple Syndication (it might stand for something else, depending on who you ask). Basically, it's like a news ticker feed from individual websites. And your News Aggregator (AKA feed reader, AKA RSS Reader) reads this news ticker 'feed' and formats it into little headlines. You can read the headline and determine whether this is of interest to you. If so, you click on the link for the whole story. If not, you skip to the next headline. Generally, you can set up your news aggregator to subscribe to a any number of these feeds. When a site you are subscribed to changes, your news aggregator will let you know. So you don't have to check for new updates.

The news aggregators I use are Awasu at work, and FM Radio from socialdynamx at home. For people who don't use Radio Userland. I can highly recommend Awasu as a news aggregator. I've never had any problems with it, and I've been using it since August. It's got a very familiar Windows application interface. It's very easy to add and manage feeds. It also has a lot of other features

For a more explicit outline of how I use Awasu: I subscribe to about 30 different feeds. The major ones are Yahoo News top stories and sports, (take a moment and go to yahoo news. look at the bottom of the left column - see that orange XML graphic? That's a link to the syndication. Went you want to add a new feed to your news aggregator, that link is what you would point to.) BBC world News, I also subscribe to some geeky gearhead and technology sites such as Mobile Tracker and Gizmodo. A RedSox fan blog, my brother's blog, and other more personal type blogs.

I also subscribe to a site called Feedster. Feedster is a blog indexer and search tool. Like Google (indeed the design is quite googlish) , but for syndicated stuff. You can search for "Minneapolis" and get all recent posts with the text "Minneapolis" in the post. I've subscribed to that result. So, anytime anyone in the world posts about Minneapolis, it comes up in my Feedster feed. I've found a lot of blogs I now follow that way.

Finally, I subscribe to a some feeds through MyRss. Many websites don't put out RSS feeds, but with MyRss you can turn a website into a feed. For example, the GIS world seems to be pretty slow to adopt blogging. I can't find any GIS feeds. So, I put a couple GIS news sites into MyRSS, and it syndicates them for me. There are different configuration options for different costs. The free version, which I use, can have mixed results, plus it has a pop up ad you have to go through. But you can pay to remove that, and pay a little more to have someone customize it.  I've created two "channels" (MyRSS calls them that) Directions Magazine and GIS Cafe, and I've subscribed to channels other people have created, like Arseblog.

I had to write this down for people who don't know about this because I think it's worth it, or think it's complicated. If this is new to you - then let me say, it just seems complicated because it's unfamiliar. An initial time investment of two hours will pay off big time.

4:31:08 PM