Friday, July 01, 2005

The joy of Bloglines

Bloglines is a service that (without getting too technical) tells me when blogs I'm interested in post something new. To me, it's like a web-based USENET news reader for blogs.

It's really good for keeping up to date with things that don't update frequently (I call this "tracking glaciers"). I can hit Slashdot whenever, and it will usually have something hew. Some other places have really good posts but only update a few times a week. With Bloglines, I don't waste a lot of time polling all those sites to see when they change. I just poll Bloglines alone, and as a result I can track a lot more sites.

The other thing about following a site this way is that I hardly notice if someone falls off the face of the Earth for a while. Every so often I see a post from someone that says, "hey sorry I haven't posted in so many months" and it's funny to me because I didn't spend those months reloading their unchanging page over and over, and I might never have known there was a long break if they hadn't told me.

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