I’m a big fan of Bloglines, the free online newsfeed aggregator. I keep talking about how aggregators are a big deal, and as time passes I believe this more and more. And aggregators are a natural fit for an online service like Bloglines (as opposed to a downloadable client like FeedDemon), because they can benefit from a sort of “super-aggregation” across all Bloglines users. I get good recommendations on new blogs to subscribe to, and of course I can use the exact same setup at home and at work. Here’s my current personal newsfeed list.
Here’s an example of why aggregators are so damned useful. I wanted to follow the Tour de France, but I’m not a huge cycling fan; I was just hopping on the Lance Armstrong bandwagon. So I wanted to have a quick and easy way to check the cycling headlines every day. I found the page I wanted on the BBC’s site: BBC Sport | Other Sports | Cycling | UK Edition. From my Bloglines account, I subscribed to the RSS feed for this page, and voila! I had a simple but effective headline news about exactly the story I was interested in. No need to scan through the sports pages. And now that Lance has picked up trophy number six, I can unsubscribe and stop paying attention to cycling news.
It turns out that Jon Udell also likes Bloglines. Check out his comments here.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 