Blogrolling In Our Time

I've recently had my first request to add someone else's blog to my blogroll (that monstrosity over to your left, if you're not reading this through some sort of a feed amalgamator), which gave me a nicely warm and cozy feeling -- it's always nice to be wanted.

And that led me to wonder if everyone reading this has heard of feeds, RSS, Atom, and those other possibly-confusing things that help make blogs easier to navigate and read. (I'm pretty sure my mother hasn't, so I'll write this for her, at least.) Basically, RSS and Atom are two different ways to distribute "content" (one of those great, amorphous New Economy words) -- just about any kind of website can have updates tracked and delivered by one or both of those methods. Antick Musings uses both -- the direct links to this site's feeds are at the top of the Blogroll -- because so far they're free and automatic, so I don't have to do anything or have a clue how it happens. And there are websites and applications that keep track of these "feeds," so a reader can have an automatically-updated list of blogs, LiveJournals, websites, and so on without having to visit all of them repeatedly.

I use Bloglines for my blog-reading -- it's not the only tool for the job, but I like it, and it's good if you use more than one computer to read blogs. It's web-based, so it keeps track of what you've read and not read on the server side. I have no idea if it's the best possible tool; it's the first one I came across that seemed to do what I wanted, so I tried it, and it's worked excellently so far.

As I had this post sitting half-read in one window, I came across a link to a survey of various feed readers. If anyone out there is already reading a couple of blogs "manually," check out that survey: you might find a tool that will help you organize them -- though, I should warn you, that you'll probably end up adding lots of extra blogs just because it's easy to do so. There also are higher-powered desktop applications to organize feeds, but, if you're actually reading this, I can't imagine you need to jump up to that level yet.

Anyway -- all you who skimmed past the part you already know can start reading again -- I organize my blogroll (the list of blogs I read) through Bloglines. And Bloglines also allows me to publish that list on my own blog, making it very neatly incestuous. (Especially since I have Antick Musings on the blogroll, so I can make sure everything is feeding the way it should.) So that list of things off on the left is stuff I read regularly, and try to keep up-to-date on. (Though, right at the moment, I have 438 unread articles, which is what happens when I miss two days.)

Right now, I'm reading 177 feeds. I am still adding things, as new people start blogging, or as I discover new and interesting blogs, but I'm trying not to add too many, to keep my head from exploding. So it might take a while for me to get out to all of the corners of the world that interest me. And I might not just add a reciprocal link to someone if I don't think I'll be reading their blog regularly. (I'm particularly avoiding, as much as I can, very political blogs, since that's not what I want to do here, and I've just gotten my blood pressure down, and I need to keep it there. And, since I'm afraid my prevailing political attitude is best summed up by Rufus T. Firefly -- "Whatever it is, I'm against it" -- things on both sides can set me off.)

On the other hand, I do want to know about neat blogs I might have missed; I'm still poking through the blogrolls of people in my blogroll as I have time. So my list will, I'm sure, continue to expand.