Website of the week

Everybody and their dog has a blog (or two) these days. This creates limitless sources of information and inspiration. But all of that data can be hard to organize.

You can try using a simple rss feed to marshal your favorite blogs, but it can be messy and frustrating. Or you could flag all of your favorite blogs in your bookmarks, but then you still have to visit each individual website, which can be a pain if your internet connection isn’t capable of warp speed.

The answer to the problem? Bloglines.com. Here, you can set up your own account, complete with a totally customizable set of feeds. That’s right, you can read every post you want, all while staying on one website.

Bloglines also makes it easy to find new blogs to read — a bit too easy. You can see who else is loyal to any one of your favorite feeds, and then see what other blogs they read. You can find other users with similar tastes, and poach their feeds. Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself addicted to hundreds of blogs.
Bloglines is still in beta, which means that there are sure to be some kinks to smooth out. The most annoying item on this website’s list of cons is that with some blogs, you can’t read entire posts via Bloglines. They’ll give you a summary or the first paragraph, and from there you can follow the link to the actual post. This is generally set up by the blog owner, so that their website will generate more traffic.