Monday, April 04, 2005

Cool site

I'm probably the last person to hear or see this but, I've just discovered a great site call Bloglines. Basically, it acts as an RSS/Atom/XML/Blog aggegator. If you're not familiar with those terms, the lay man explanation follows. Many, many sites syndicate their content via a format known as RSS (which I believe stands for Really Simple Syndication). There are a couple other formats such as Atom, etc., but the idea is the same: create a very small text file that contains all of the important info users may need, for example, headlines and top stories, and allow users to grab and read them. The benefit is that I can see the headlines for a given site without having to visit it. The next step is to aggregate all of your favorite feeds into one central location so you can see all the latest from each site without having to visit them individually. Until Bloglines only third party applications have served as feed aggregators (I may be wrong about this, but I've never seen a web driven aggregator until Bloglines). Of course this means that you would have to install said app on every machine you may want to check the feeds from. Enter Bloglines, which has created a web based aggregator. I won't go into detail about how it works, becuase they've got ample documentation at their site. I definitely recommend this to anyone that frequents mutliple sites, multiple times daily. The best part of Bloglines is its price-nothing. The service if free? Do yourself a favor and check it out.

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