Bloglines lets you read your favorite blogs online - take your news with you. It is one of the most popular feed aggregators around and has gotten better under the ownership of Ask.com.

Quick intro

While there are some keyboard shortcuts which can get move you around the screen inside Bloglines, the layout is easy enough to manuever. The left column lets you get to your feeds and sort through new items quickly. To save your favorite items, you can either move it to your own blog within the Bloglines system or to you own Clippings section. You can also bookmark an item within del.icio.us, digg, reddit, email a link or dotnetkicks.com.

Under the Extras section, a useful feature is the Get a Subscribe To Bloglines Button. It allows you to choose a subscription button to allow people to add your blog quickly to their own Bloglines account. For mailing lists which don’t have online archives, you can create an email address which will mail anything sent to it to your Bloglines account - a great way of gathering all your news reading in one place.

Getting news feeds into your account

When you originally sign up for your account, you’re given some choices on pre-categorized groups of feeds. Adding your own favorite sites is easy - just click the Add link in the left column and type in the site or feed address/url.

By now you should have some feeds in your account. The system is smart enough to analyze your feed choices and recommend related blogs. Under Extras, you will be able to click Recommendations and get some new sites added. Also, when you read your feeds you’ll see a related feeds link above the feed name which also gives you more suggestions.