Today I want to talk about a new technology that I’ve begun using pretty heavily over the past month. I first discovered it from professional web developer Mike Davidson, who has redesigned and developed countless high profile sites including ESPN.com and ABC.com. If you go to his ten things page, you’ll see the number one on that list is called Bloglines.

Bloglines has become my favorite destination, often going several times a day. Simply put, it has changed my browsing habits of all of my favorite websites. So, what exactly is Bloglines?

More and more websites are implementing a new technology called syndication. When a websites syndicates itself, this means it allows other websites or software to subscribe to its news feed. This means that now it becomes almost totally unneccesary to visit a website which broadcasts a news feed like RSS, Atom, RDF, or XML feeds. For more information on the technical side of this technology, go visit these sites to read more.

Okay, okay!… enough about the technical stuff. What exactly am I talking about?! I am going to make a very bold statement about you and your Internet viewing habits. Chances are you are reading my website because you either know me, you’re interested in me, and/or something I have to say is interesting to you somehow. I’m not guaranteeing any of the said comments, but that’ll be my assumption. Based on this assumption, there’s a good chance that there’s someone else out there who has their own website which you visit just like you visit mine. And, more likely than not, more people you know or get to know will have their own websites or their own blogs or their own online journals in the future. Chances are that you’re probably already visiting anywhere between one and ten websites who’s authors regularly to semi-regularly update with new content, with new stories, new information, new advice.

Week after week, month after month, my interest in websites has grown. I started to visit more and more often to certain websites and this list slowly grew. Thus, to load up everyone’s website again and again started to take forever. I mean, I could literally sit here and spend hours visiting everyone’s websites just to see if they had updated with new info.

This is where Bloglines has changed my habit. Most of the websites I visit have this news feed technology as I stated above and bloglines allows me to harvest all of these feeds in one place. I now have to only visit ONE website to see the the updated content of almost EVERY site I visit! The absolutely wonderful thing about this is that I don’t have to even go to a website that hasn’t updated their content because Bloglines will inform me by bolding the website name and numbering how many new posts there have been since I last visited.

Now, to make this even easier to understand, here’s a list of the benefits of Bloglines.

  1. I can go to one website to check the updates for many websites
  2. Even if someone updates some older post content, Bloglines shows me this has happened!
  3. I don’t have to be distracted by other elements on someone’s personal website if I don’t want to be!
  4. You can now track packages from USPS, Fed-EX and UPS just by entering your tracking/confirmation number!
  5. No annoying ads
  6. Doesn’t cost me a penny
  7. Need I say more?

Go sign up today, you won’t regret it and you’ll save lots of time!