How subscribing works

I want to stay in touch with many bloggers. There are two ways to do it:

1. The slow way we all started out: Click bookmarks (favorites), click site, wait for site, see if site has anything new, close site, go back to bookmarks and try another

-OR-

2. The fast way: Click my Bloglines icon, see a list of the blogs I’m following, see whether they have new posts. Click again, see a list of those posts’ titles. Click again – if interested – to read the post. Back-back to go to another. See? More reading, less surfing. Yes!!

Some examples: At left is my subscription list. You’ll notice some in bold, some not – the “not” are blogs that have no new posts since last I looked (thus, no time wasted looking!) Those in bold tell me how many posts I’ve not seen.

If I click on one of those, say, BBC News, I get a list of the most recent BBC posts, like so:

(I’ve just included a thumbnail here so this post loads faster – click on it to read it as I normally see it).

Cool, huh? A list and a line from each recent post. I can skim them over and read any that interest me.

Finally, I can have groups of blogs listed together. For instance, I have a few new blog friends and I want to keep up on their work. So I made a playlist called “Friends.” When I click on it, I get this:

Here I see not only what my friends are writing about, but how long ago they posted.

All you have to do to use Bloglines (or one of several others like it) is to open a free account with a user name and password.

You tell it, then, what blogs or websites you want to stay up on, and away you go. You can even get a toolbar icon to use while browsing: Find something you like? Click on your “Subscribe with Bloglines” icon, and it becomes part of your list.

Get efficient! Stay in touch! Try subscribing. Click here for more info: