Making Cents-Sense of Technology Business Internet Marketing News: Blogging and RSS

Making Cents-Sense out of

Technology - Business - Internet - Marketing and Entertainment

Blogging and RSS

Posted by semcents at September 28, 2007 9:33 AM and is filed under Blogging

Bloglines v3 beta
There are loads of RSS readers out there, including worthy entries like NewsGator and Google Reader, as well as some with Web 2.0 interfaces on steroids, such as Pageflakes.

-
Make your PC more useful. Get the free Google Pack.

Bloglines, despite its aging Web 1.0 interface, because it did what I wanted done with a minimum of fuss. Finally, though, the new Bloglines v3 beta offers an updated UI with a start page and some drag-and-drop ordering that brings the RSS service into the modern era.

Reading RSS feeds isn't to recreate a full, rich-media Web experience. If I wanted that, I'd be surfing directly to source sites. Instead, I want to scan headlines and summaries. I don't want to play around with a lot of buttons, links and options; I'm looking for information.

I want simple ways to subscribe to feeds and see what's new, with some basic feed organization tools. I want to be able to import and export OPML (a way to save a collection of feed subscriptions). And being able to "clip" and save individual stories is nice.

The beta was pretty limited when I started testing, without even a way to mark posts as still unread (that's since been addressed with a "pin" function). I'm still awaiting the "clippings" (keep and save some items) and "publish" (mark items to put in a new RSS feed you can make public) options, but the Bloglines beta help pages assure such functions are on the way.

The start page shows you summaries of headlines when you hover over the item, an AJAX standard that's just coming to Bloglines, and lets you easily add, delete and rearrange components.