Bloglines Magic?

After watching the video, "RSS in Plain English", I was excited to get started with my own RSS aggregator. There are a variety of news websites in particular that I wish I had more time to visit. A few people made comments in last week's chat about not having the time they wanted to browse news and information sites that interest them. I think this is a popular feeling for people who do not utilize an RSS aggregator. I chose to try Bloglines because it sounded relatively simple to get started with. When I was first getting started, I wasn't sure exactly how to get subscribed to the specific feeds I was interested in. I tried to copy and paste the url for the RSS feed, but was having difficulty getting the aggregator to recognize new feeds from those sites. Instead, I stumbled onto a very easy solution. Bloglines offers a "Bloglines Subscription Button" that can be added easily to your browser bookmark bar. For Safari all I had to do was drag and drop the button onto my bookmarks menu. From there, any time I visited a site with an available RSS feed all I had to do was click on the Sub with Bloglines button and it was automatically added to my bloglines feeds menu. Having access to all of my favorite news and magazine articles in one location definitely allows me to at least get an idea of what the new information out there is all about. It does cut down on travel time (getting to and finding new information) but the aggregator still doesn't magically create additional time to read the more in depth articles. At the least you can catch a glimpse of hot news.

My bottom line on RSS aggregators: Wonderful tool that keeps you informed about new content being posted to your favorite sites, but has no solution for the magic needed to create more time to read those articles! Subscribing to and getting interesting feeds delivered to you is certainly addictive.

The best things about using the Bloglines tool and RSS feeds in general this week was the ability to be very specific as to the content you are subscribing to. I love that ESPN and even the Pittsburgh Penguins have specific feeds that you can subscribe to. You don't have to get all the headlines from the entire sports world. It is possible to just get feeds regarding your favorite teams or even feeds that are only photo galleries.