Topic for today: Bloglines.com

Upon the urging of a friend, I decided to try Bloglines for a month to sample their service. Bloglines is a web-based service that allows you to view all of your favorite blogs through their online portal. It is not a desktop download.

Overall, I found the service SUPER easy to set up. One thing that I loved was that it was easy to set up some of the pre-programmed feeds for news services, such as the BBC, Fodor’s Travel, and Reuters (just to name a few). Adding custom feeds of favorite blogs of the month was quite simple as well.

I also loved the formatting of the posts. I found them easy to read and the layout of the webpage pleasant and not overwhelming. It was easy to navigate from one blog to the next and the feed folder format is fairly intuitive.

The one feature that I did not care for was the fact that once I opened a feed folder, Bloglines automatically considered all the posts read. While I could retrieve them at a later date using a special function, I found that it was easier to mark each post I wanted to save as I went through the list. I suppose this would not be a problem for people who check their aggregators several times a day. This is significantly different than Newsgator which will keep each post until you mark it as read.

Bloglines has a number of other features as a part of their service, such as a free blog, package tracking and blogroll wizard. I did not use any of these services during the past month. I may try them out to see how they work. My focus was really on the news aggregator function.

Summary: The major advantage of Bloglines is the incredibly easy set up. I would suggest this for those who are new to the blogosphere.

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