Beautiful Bloglines

You may never have heard of RSS aggregators before, but someday you will, although eventually I’m sure they’ll have a sweeter name. If you’re the least bit of an information junkie, read on. Bloglines may well be the place for you to jump in and see what the fuss is all about.

I have complained in the past that I don’t care for most of the RSS aggregators I’ve tried. I like Aggie, but it’s old and it seems pretty clear that nobody’s moving it forward. I emailed Aggie author Joe Gregorio, and he confirmed this. As he put it, “The three-paned aggregators really took the wind out of our sails.” But then he went on to recommend Bloglines, which he uses. That was a good enough recommendation for me, so off I went to set up a Bloglines account. And sure enough, I like it. It’s still somewhat like a three-pane aggregator, but has the key features that I’m after. I can sort the blogs however I like, and I can mark them all as read in a single quick button click. And since it’s an online service (rather than a browser that runs only on my machine), I can view from anywhere, and I can show you my reading list. Voila:
Bloglines | Ned’s Blogs.

Nick Denton of Gawker Media has got a similar online blog aggregator experiment going on: kinja.com. It’s a simpler, more stripped-down tool, designed to bring weblogs to the masses. As it says on the site, “Kinja is not aimed at early adopters.” Read: “RSS geekboys need not apply. We don’t need your whiny noise around here.”