I have written about my search for an online RSS Aggregator before (twice to be exact). RSS2Email was working well, but the volume of email I was receiving through the feeds was quite unwieldy in my webmail interface. Not checking email for a day or two just made the problem worse. Sometimes I had to delete large swaths of messages just for lack of time to read them. This was frustrating since I knew there was stuff in there I wanted to read but was missing due to info overflow.

Enter bloglines, a web based RSS aggregator which I had evaluated several months ago. The interface has been changed; it is much nicer to look at. Its design makes moving through the content of several blogs a day much faster. While my RSS to email script was creating a message for each post on each blog, bloglines simply presents all the posts that have not been read on one page for each blog. Originally, this was one of the reasons I chose RSS2Email, but the bloglines method seems to work very well in practice. Bloglines also has a handy notifier that can be installed on a local mac or windows machine. An HTML notifier is available for those who can’t install software on their OS.

Currently the service is free and the site is without advertisements. Surely a service like this will attract more and more users. Eventually, some money will need to be made somewhere to support the site. It will be interesting to see how long it will last in its current (free) form and how it will be supported in the future.

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