In my continued exploration of the pressing question, “Can RSS help me keep up with the vast numbers of blogs I want to read?”, I’m also trying out Bloglines. Instead of pulling RSS feeds together in a client on your machine, Bloglines uses a web-based, server-side approach: You upload your subscription list and then you can log in from anywhere to check your subscriptions. It’s smartly designed; my one complaint — and one reason I’ll probably stick with Radio for now — is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t let you aggregate postings from all your subscribed blogs onto one page that you can scan. Instead, you get two panes — a window on the left with folders for each subscribed blog, and a window on the right with the postings for the selected folder.
Why don’t I like this? Well, for me, the labor-saving aspect of an RSS aggregator is that I don’t have to click on one bookmark after another in my browser to check the blogs I want to check. I want to scroll down one long page (which is what Radio gives me). Why would I want my aggregator to make me click on one folder after another to catch up with my subscriptions? Isn’t that awfully close to the way my browser works? Put everything on one page for me — or at least give me that choice. Since Bloglines is a relatively new service and it shows every sign of having been carefully designed with the user in mind (Mark Fletcher’s blog tracks its progress), I can only hope that it will offer this feature at some point.
Addendum Oscar Bartos points out in the comments that Bloglines does offer the one-page view, though it’s not intuitively obvious or called out in any way. I’m going to live with it for a few days but I think I’ve found my RSS home, at least for now…
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