Aggregation

Been busy with this concept for the last couple of days. I've gone from reading NO blogs to... well, I'm up to about 15. This is really addicting.

What turned me into a blog crack-addict? Aggregator.

I'll try to keep it Barney-level folks.

Most blog services offer an RSS feed. This is just a service that packages up your blog posts into a very generic format that can be sucked away quickly and displayed any old way.

Why would someone want to do this?

Simple, because some users read a lot of blogs and don’t want to go clicking around the whole internet to visit each blog, not knowing if it has been updated. So what an aggregator does is checks the blog sites you tell it to and then sucks out the latesty posts (via RSS feed) and displays them in one handy place. So you go there and see what’s new, read it in your aggregator browser, or click the link to open a new window with the real site displayed.

A few “boos” to complain about.

The online version I use only updates every hour or so, the newest posts could be missing.

The aggregator view does not show you comments.

Other than that, it’s beautiful. Check out BLOGLINES.