A heretic changes his ways …

During a conference on emerging technologies, I played the role of reigning heretic on things RSS and blogosphere. But since I returned, I’m becoming a convert to the ways of RSS.

My first step was to find an RSS aggregator that would meet my somewhat peculiar needs. I wanted something that would work on all three of my computers — a Dell laptop, a Dell desktop and a Mac G4 iBook.

Software solutions weren’t cutting it. I found several that looked promising, including FeedDemon, which Howard Owens recommended, but I really wasn’t finding anything that would run on both platforms and allow me to keep all of my feeds in synch.

So I started looking around at Web-based solution. My first attempt was Feedster, which just didn’t do it for me. I found the interface to be somewhat cumbersome and confusing, and I was having a tough time setting it up.

Then I turned to Bloglines, which recently was purchased by Ask Jeeves. After a few days using it, I’m hooked.

It was relatively easy to set up, though I have to admit I struggled figuring out how to get the feeds from some of my favorite sites. Most of that was my refusal to use the help files. But after some tinkering, I have it set up so I can now monitor the sites I use most frequently much more easily than I did when I was hopping randomly from site to site each day.

I set it up so I can easily add feeds (Bloglines has a bookmarklet that’s pretty easy to add to IE, Firefox and Safari browsers. That makes it really easy to add feeds. It also has a few other cool features, including the ability to make your RSS subscriptions public. I’m planning to add that to my site this weekend.

I already have 25 feeds set up that I monitor regularly, and Bloglines makes it easy for me to see posts I haven’t read yet. It also makes it pretty easy to create a hierarchy so you can categorize feeds.

I still think RSS is a jargony, geeky world that will seem impenetrable to the “average” web user, but that can be overcome with good, clear directions and a little research. The other thing that’s really needed is a good recommendation feature that guides people to feeds worth adding. There’s a lot of noise out there. There are several recommendation features out there, including one on Bloglines, but I think this is something newspapers and other traditional news sources could provide for readers. I’m also curious to see how some of the branded readers work for media companies. I know the Guardian is about to launch something like this, and I think CNet is, too.

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