Geek Chic of the Week: RSS, Part II

This is Part II of a three-part series. The first post covered why you should care about RSS and how to use basic RSS readers. This second post covers more sophisticated RSS aggregators. The third post will go more into the mechanics and history of RSS for those who are really interested in knowing more.

Last week we talked about adding RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! or iGoogle pages, which is a great place to start with RSS. Now that you’ve mastered that (right?) let’s talk about another, more sophisticated way to monitor feeds: an RSS feed aggregator. There are two types of aggregators I’ll talk about here: web-based and local applications.

Web-based Aggregators

Let’s start with the web-based aggregators. Two of the most popular are Google Reader and Bloglines.

I know many people who use — and love — Google Reader. But, honestly, I’ve never tried it. So, I’m going to focus my examples on Bloglines, which I’m more familiar with. But, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when it comes to learning new stuff online, don’t be afraid to just try things out. Give both apps a test drive and see which one you prefer!

Here’s a screenshot of my Bloglines page: