RSS Feeds and Bloglines

This week's activity involving RSS feeds and feed readers was really informative for me. I troll around the internet all the time, but I've never experimented with either of these features in the past. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about Bloglines. I know that I think RSS feeds are amazingly handy when you want to collect information in an easy-to-read format, and I think that Bloglines is a fantastic concept with a useful purpose, but it's so clunky.

I found myself clicking all around Bloglines trying to find the best way of navigating it because there was just...so much there. I'm not sure I ever really discovered the most effective way to search for RSS feeds on the site; I bumbled around awkwardly and gravitated toward lists like the 200 Most Popular Feeds. Overall, it seemed as though the website was too dense with links and tabs and information; even for someone as familiar with the internet and technology as I am, I sometimes spent several minutes trying to figure out exactly what I was doing. I found it easier to go to the website, copy the address and paste it into the feed reader than to search for feeds on Bloglines. The feed search engines, the names of which now escape me, were also handy. My frustration with the Bloglines site could be because I'm unfamiliar with the service, but at the same time, it should be sort of user-friendly for all the newcomers to the website, particularly if RSS Feeds are gaining in popularity and being exposed to a lot of new users.

I set up a Bloglines account, and I love all the feeds I signed up for, but I'm wondering how often I'm actually going to use it. Perhaps if I'm having a slow morning on the desk, I might pop over to check on what's new, but for the most part, it seems...extraneous for me. I'm not a habitual blog reader, so I don't really have a problem checking the few sites I keep up with on a regular basis. Not only that, I use Google Alerts, which allows me to have weekly, daily, or up-to-the-minute updates on any topic sent right to my email inbox. I have them set up for several different topics, and once a day, I get a few comprehensive newsletters with abstracts and links to articles dealing with the subjects for which I've set up alerts. It's fast and easy and thorough, and it doesn't require any extra accounts or clients anywhere to use it. All you need is your regular email address. It's still in its beta testing phase right now, but it works like a dream.

Overall, I guess Bloglines is cool; RSS feeds are definitely handy. I'm just not sure how much I'll actually use it. If I were more of a newshound, I would find the service wildly useful and to be a huge timesaver, but for someone who is only a sometime-blog follower, I don't see it becoming a staple in my technological diet.