I have three bookmarks that I use every day: My Yahoo, Bloglines, and mac.fiveforks.com. My Yahoo is for news, stocks, and some e-mail, like receiving Clark Howard’s e-mail newsletter.
Bloglines is a web-based “Feed Reader” that keeps tabs on several different blogs I read. It’s kind of like a My Yahoo for your favorite blogs. It can also receive e-mail newsletters like Motley Fool’s News. (I should really move my Clark Howard subscription to it… hmmm…) Bloglines is much more efficient than visiting blogs directly, because it keeps track of new postings and puts them all in one place. Very useful for blogs where new posts appear every now and then. It is better than software-based feed-readers in many ways, but mainly because I can access it from any computer at any time (Home or work, IBM or Mac.)
I went ahead and put Ted, Kelly, Carol, Claire’s and other mac.five blogs in Bloglines. So I often don’t make it to mac.fiveforks.com because I read new postings via bloglines first. (Although I like the comments summary on mac.five.)
Bloglines has other features, including the ability to share your bloglines and you can even have your own blog. I don’t use the blog feature, since I use MovableType, but for fun, I tested it and it works.
This is a link to my Bloglines blog:
www.bloglines.com/blog/fishback
This is a link to the public view of my Bloglines feed reader:
www.bloglines.com/public/fishback
If you keep up with more than 5 blogs or other “RSS” feeds (like SlashDot) then I recommend Blogines.
I, too, started using bloglines to keep track of all the different blogs and sites I visit. I thought it was interesting how I’d added some of the mac.fiveforks.com blogs and some time later, based on my current blog subscriptions, bloglines suggested several other websites I might be interested in, and just about every mac.fiveforks.com blog was automatically listed in the suggestions.
Anyway, I’ve also created RSS feeds for both Rosary Army and the Willits family site, though I haven’t made that fact very well known. Those, too, can be viewed via bloglines. Here’s my public list: http://www.bloglines.com/public/gregwillits