Bloglines and Google Reader

I read a lot of blogs – probably too many. I look at a wide range of topics such as news highlights, gadget/tech info, science, humor, and recipes as well as family and friend sites. To keep up with the posts, I use RSS feeds rather than visiting each blog. It’s a quick way to scan through all the posts and pick ones to read in detail or mark for further comment. My RSS aggregator of choice is Bloglines. I’ve had posts about Bloglines here and here. It’s been relatively stable, it's easy to set up, and has nice features. However, I’m always willing to try something new.

I was reading a post on Micro Persuasion that was downplaying Bloglines and talking about a new RSS aggregator product from Google called Google Reader. It praised the new product and included a link to a Lifehacker post that compared Bloglines to Google Reader. Again, it gave high praise and pointed out some interesting features of the Google Reader. The Lifehacker article did point out that it’s a Google Labs product, however it seemed to be very stable. The Google Labs page clearly says these aren't ready for primetime, but I was intrigued by the reviewer's experiences and I like Google Notebook that is also still in the Labs. I should have learned my lesson with my Writely beta experience, but I’m a Google fan, so I thought I’d try it out.

I can’t disagree more with the Google Reader satisfaction expressed in the posts from Micro Persuasion and Lifehacker. I’ve tried Google Reader with both Firefox and IE on two separate computers running Windows XP and have had problems with accessing feeds from both. It always messes up what is read and what is displayed when the feed list is updated – unlike Bloglines that now has a nice update procedure. The Google Reader badge of interesting items didn’t work with my blog either. The page link worked ok, but who wants to ‘pull’ items in this era of web 2.0? After a couple days of trying to look at feeds, I gave up. It was too frustrating. At this point, the bugs far outweigh the added features. I’m happy for those who have the right system to make it work, but I’m not in that list.

Bottom line is I'm sticking with Bloglines! Although the Google Reader features sound interesting, I’m going to wait until it’s out of Google Labs and stable before I even think about switching.

Spotback

With the blog explosion on the web, it's hard to keep up with all the things posted on even selected blogs. I am a big believer in Bloglines, but I've had trouble with that site in some browsers so I'm not able to keep up on my reading. Also, although many stories propogate through the blogosphere so you'll likely see them on some popular sites, the problem with a site like Bloglines is your focus may limit exposure and you might miss something of interest. Because of these limitations I started looking for alternatives.

I recently signed up for a free account at Spotback (now in Beta). It's a news aggregator of sorts that has more of the feel of a newspaper. Stories are organized in categories like general news, technology, science, sports, etc. As you browse through the headlines and read stories, you can rate the stories. The software uses your ratings to customize which stories appear on your page. So rather than signing up for a particular feed, you're being fed stories in categories that match your interests.

I'm curious if others have tried this site or similar services. I have only started making ratings, but it didn't take long for stories to show up from some familiar sites like BoingBoing, MAKE magazine, and others. Hopefully as the number of ratings increases, the story selection will improve.