Thoughts on Bloglines
For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing around with Bloglines, which lets you go to a single web page to read almost any blog. The big advantage of it is that it tells you which blogs have new posts, so you don’t waste time checking blogs that haven’t updated. There are some disadvantages, too, however.
- You don’t get to see the design of the website as the creator intended it. While I use an off-the-shelf Typepad template, some bloggers put a lot of creative effort into their designs.
- Similarly, you don’t get to see people’s blogrolls and other side-bar content.
- You don’t show up as hits on the bloggers’ site. This is particularly an issue for bloggers who are trying to make money by selling ads (again not me), but I don’t know any bloggers who aren’t at least mildly obsessive about how many hits they’re getting. On the other hand, you can see on Bloglines how many people have subscribed to your feeds.
- Not all of the blogs I read have feeds that Bloglines can read — it couldn’t find either Jo(e) or Suzanne’s blogs. I’m afraid that if I get into the habit of reading via Bloglines, I’ll forget to check out what they’re up to.
- Perhaps most critically, Bloglines only shows main posts, not comments. And in many of the blogs I read, the comments are at least half the fun. It’s easy enough to click over to check them out, but my sense is that only a small fraction of bloglines readers do. You’re missing out.
July 23rd, 2005 at 11:40 pm
Jo(e) has an rss feed you can sub to via bloglines; I know that only because you recently sent me to her blog, and while there, I subbed!
Oh, and most of the time I still end up going to people’s blogs to read, though I start on bloglines. For one thing, some people’s entries are truncated on bloglines, and for another, you can’t comment there…But I hadn’t thought about the potential for it to impact my numbers! NOW where will I get my ego blows? 😉
July 24th, 2005 at 8:43 am
I read via RSS feeds in my Safari browser. It’s really the only way I can keep up on blogs. Unfortunately not only do I not leave hits but I also don’t show up as a subscriber on any feed service since my own browser is the feed reader. I have limited time to comment/read comments, too, so this works for me. It’s not ideal but it works. I think feed readers will become more sophisticated soon though.
July 24th, 2005 at 10:01 am
Actually you can keep track of updated comments through bloglines – at least if they’re from Haloscan.
I do know what you mean about missing the website design, but I always end up clicking over to the actual blog anyway when the entry is interesting!
July 25th, 2005 at 1:46 am
I use bloglines just to tell me who has posted recently. I almost always click through to read the comments. And then sometimes I am in the mood to ignore bloglines and just use my blogroll or surf around.
I know that a bunch of people read my blog though bloglines so I am not sure why it wouldn’t let you.
July 25th, 2005 at 10:18 am
I like the RSS feed, to keep up-to-date with my favorites. I’ve got it on my site. I’m still unfamiliar with the whole bloglines concept. But anything that helps keep all this straight has to be a good thing – a girl only has so many hours in a day!
July 25th, 2005 at 1:00 pm
I love Bloglines. There’s no way I could keep up with reading as many blogs as I do without it. I do often click into comments on some blogs that I read, and I do feel bad that I’m not adding to people’s hits stats when I read from the feeds. But RSS feeds are one of the main things separating blogs from web pages that get updated frequently – it’s the only way I could keep up with all of the great reading out there!
July 25th, 2005 at 9:22 pm
Hmmm, both Jo(e) and Suzanne’s blog feeds are showing up now — I guess it was just a blip in the machine.
I know there are good reasons to use bloglines — it’s very convenient, and it’s especially helpful for people who use screenreaders, which often get bogged down by elaborate sidebars. That’s why I make the full text of my posts available to RSS feeds, not just excerpts.
July 26th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
I use RSS Bandit (www.rssbandit.org) on my desktop to read the feeds I’m subscribed to. I tend to unsubscribe from feeds that don’t publish full excerpts because I find it too distracting and annoying to browse to the site, especially for blogs with very regular posts. One nice thing about RSS Bandit is that it supports the Comment API that some blog servers support, which allows you to follow along with the comments in the client. Unfortunately typepad doesn’t support the API though, I don’t know if any of the ‘big ones’ like livejournal/blogger do, it seems that it’s mostly the more technical and individual focused blogs support it, running things like .text and dasblog.
July 27th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Let me vote with the bloglines group. If time were infinite, I’d love to scan through the actual sites, but there is no better way to take the important stuff (read:text) in than with a feedreader. It took some getting used to — I went through three or four aggregators before settling on bloglines — but I won’t ever go back.
— Brian
July 28th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Yet another Bloglines fan. It lets me keep in touch with blogs I’d bookmark (or add to a blogroll) but just never get to as often as I might like. I have great intentions, but poor follow-through, heh…
I figure if I’m reading 3/4 of their stuff through RSS, and click through to the site itself 1/4 of the time (to see comments, the design, photos, etc.) – well, that’s more traffic than they’d be getting from me otherwise!