Sunday, January 27, 2008

Who knew?! No really, who knew?

Did you know about Bloglines? Why didn't you tell me? [laugh]

I know I've seen people say "I'm behind in reading my bloglines" and I've seen the little subscribe icons on a few pages, but it never really registered for me what this might be.

Over the last two days or so I've seen a few posts, most notably the recent post and comments by Chris at Stumbling over Chaos. This post, and the one that provoked it, are all about how people respond to comments (do you email the poster or post into your own comments yourself).

(As an aside I only discovered in the past month that blogger will now send you email notification when you have a comment so that you can email the poster back -- thought that you could only do this with typepad or when you hosted your own blog -- again, who knew!).

In the context of this (sometimes not so pleasant) conversation, people kept mentioning that they read so many blogs they couldn't even keep up with the posts without bloglines, let alone subsequent comments. [This I did know, but on many posts you can now get emails sent to you with every follow up comment -- I did this once on one post and decided I didn't wasn't really interested enough to get all that follow up.]

So why use bloglines... what can you see? Somehow I had this vision that it wouldn't be as good as looking at blogs. OMG... it's fabulous! Up until now, I've just been using my bookmarks in my internet browser and visiting every site with the hope that the writer had posted since the last time I visited (and many times I was disappointed). With bloglines, you can see when there has been a new post and then by clicking on a link it takes your right to the new post! Score!

No more repeat visits with no new content. I can now be happy about "watching" a number of blogs I like that I know post relatively infrequently because now I can visit them when, and only when, they have new posts.

This is dreamy!

Get an account, if not Bloglines one of the other aggregators. You'll never look back.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I felt the same way when I discovered Bloglines, they made it so easy :-)

Anonymous said...

RSS readers are really the only way to go. There are so MANY good blogs out there, how else can a person keep them all straight? (grin)

Ellen Bloom said...

Yeah, everyone is always telling me about bloglines. Thanks for the great explanation...NOW, I'll have to try it!

Robin said...

Love my Bloglines! Google Reader is also supposed to be a good aggregator. However, I've stuck with Bloglines because besides all the reasons you mentioned, the other thing I love about it is that it keeps my (long) list of blogs I read current on my blog. All I do is update the Bloglines list and it automagically appears on my blog, after initially setting it up.

Chris said...

Yay!! Welcome to the thing that really makes blog reading possible, in my opinion.

Margaret said...

I've just come back from reading all the comments on Deb and Chris' blogs, and whew! But, thanks for linking them, it was very useful!

I've been using Bloglines too, for I guess a couple of years, and have lost count of how many feeds. I started reading a lot of knitblogs when I had arm surgeries and couldn't knit. Couldn't have done it without a feed reader!

handknit168 said...

I have used bloglines since last year, it is a great tool to save your time that you can only visit the new updated post of yr subscribed blog. Highly recommended.

Lola and Ava said...

Bloglines is like crack. But a very useful crack. I find myself checking a couple times a day.
-L