Bloglines

According to Wikipedia RSS is “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Users of RSS content use programs called feed readers or aggregators: the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.”

In class we have used Bloglines, a new aggregator for blogs and other news feeds based on RSS and Atom technologies.
However, unlike other aggregators that download posts directly to your own computer Bloglines gives you the possibility of accessing your feeds from any computer, not just the computer on which you have installed another type of RSS reader. In Bloglines blog entries are downloaded and updated directly on the server.
In my opinion aggregators such as Bloglines are extremely useful in order to reduce the time needed to regularly check websites and blogs for updates, therefore, the final result in a sort of personal agenda always updated.
However, I think that I won’t often use aggregators out of this class because I don't have a blog. I do not regularly take part to blog discussions and I keep in touch with my friends abroad only using Messenger, Skype or Bebo. Therefore, I surf the net just only when I am looking for some specific information.

Tania