See You Later, Aggregator

I like aggregators like Bloglines a lot. At least in theory. I have a Google Reader account which sits on my iGoogle page. I see it everyday. And yet, somehow, I forget to look at it until I'm overwhelmed by the number of posts I'm behind on.

I suppose for me it's a case of my intentions being so much bigger than the time I've got to accomplish them in. Between my various email accounts, my facebook postings and those of my friends and our online games, and print magazines and whatever book I'm reading there just isn't enough time.

But I do love the concept. The blog posts come to you. You can read at a glance what they're about and decide to read on or skip. And it's just so darned easy to sign up for just one more.

In fact, many of the blogs I was interested in subscribing to had "Bloglines" subscription buttons, which made it very easy to sign up.

Using Google Blog Search was okay. Like all searching in Google, I found the success of your results depends on your search terms. In looking for blogs to add, there were a few blogs I knew about and could search for them fairly specifically and they were easy enough to find. Then I decided to find a random blog on each of two topics of personal interest. The number of blogs returned were huge and it took some sorting through them to find something that appealed to me. I had to sample them to find a voice and choice of topics that I found interesting. If I had had a clearer idea of what I was looking for, it might have been an easier search. But the serendipity of it was fun. And I know I can always sign up for more....

(uh oh)