Hoyd’s Pick - Bloglines!
A while back, I posted about a great Firefox extension called Sage. I’ve since moved on to a much more powerful way of organizing my RSS feeds and it’s a totally FREE web-based system called Bloglines (like Headlines, but for blogs and other pages with syndicated content). Since it’s web-based, it means that you can access it from any computer so you can always be up to date on your news. You can even have it notify you of new posts and group different feeds into folders so that everything about a particular subject all comes up together. For instance, I have a Tech folder so all the different posts on all the different Tech sites that I like to read will appear in one place - Fantastic! Plus, since it only shows new feeds, I don’t waste my time checking sites that don’t have updated content.
One other great feature is the ability to create email addresses from within your account to give out to mailing lists. This way, instead of getting emailed from a mailing list, it shows up in Bloglines in whatever related folder you sort it in. Then, if you ever start getting spam from that mailing list, you simply cancel that Bloglines address and create another one. You get a different address for each mailing list making it really easy to keep organized.
I think this service is great and I definetely think that RSS is the next big thing for the internet (if it’s not already). Once you start using Bloglines you’ll wonder how you ever surfed the web without it. You can check out my previous post for some ideas of RSS feeds to get you started. Bloglines also has a list of their top picks and can even make recommendations for you based on your current feeds.
There’s so much more that I could write about this great service, but the best thing will be for you to try it yourself. It’s very easy to use, but if you have any questions at all, feel free to post them here!