I think it’s time to inform everyone of something we call feeds. I’m sure you’ve seen them, and maybe wondered what the big deal is. Well feeds are used for distributing content across several types of platforms. The most common type is an aggregator. A program that runs on your computer, and notifies you when content has been updated, and displays it within that program. I’ll get a little more into feeds later this week. Now onto Bloglines.

For people familiar with Livejournal. What’s the most common thing people like about Livejournal? The friends view. It enables a view of all your friends blogs in one column and shows the latest entries. What if I told you could do that with any feed? Well you can. Bloglines provides a similar feature that you can use with anything that produces a feed. It even makes it incredibly simple especially for reading Xanga, Livejournal, and Blogger blogs. You simply enter the user name. For other things that produce a feed you can enter the feed link, such as the one on WyomingJarbo.com.

Helping you understand with questions:
Why? Well I read several things on the Internet a day. Most of them produce a feed. Why visit every website when I could go to one place.

Well, what’s the difference than just remembering all the links? Well not only does it remember all the links to the blogs, it displays them in context as they are updated. Like the Livejournal Friends view.

There are tons of great features to make it worth it too.

• The most notable are being able to put all your feeds into organized folders. So you could label a folder Friends, or News, depending on what the feed is from.
• Links to the actual article. Many blogs enable comments, and if you want to comment on the article, you just click the title to go to the actual post so you can comment on it.
• It lets you know what’s new immedately. If someone has updated, you’ll see it instantly… in one place.
• Completely web based.

Here are a couple of features that threw me over the edge in coolness.

• Listserv e-mail capabilities. Do you subscribe to a listserv? Do you hate how those e-mails go to your e-mail address and clutter it up? Well get this… Bloglines will create an e-mail address (as many as you need) something like jarbo234870284@bloglines.com. You can subscribe to the listserv with that e-mail address and read it in Bloglines. You can even respond to the listserv within Bloglines. Great for keeping stupid listserv e-mail out of your account.
• UPS,Fedex, and USPS tracking. Enter your tracking number into Bloglines and it will let you know if anything is updated.
• Notifier. If you are uber anxious to know what’s new, you can download a notifier to your computer to let you know the instant something is updated. You can even choose what you want to be notified about.

There are tons of other features too. I suggest you join and check it out. If you have any questions let me know. But this is how I’m reading your blog these days.

Bloglines.com