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