From Wendy Boswell,
Your Guide to Web Search.
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What is Bloglines?

Bloglines is "a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content." Basically, it's a way to compile any site you visit on a regular basis into one rich, user-friendly interface.

How does Bloglines work?

In order to understand how Bloglines works, you'll need to understand how RSS feeds work. For a detailed explanation, please read my article titled How RSS Feeds Work; but for right now, I'll provide you with a very simplistic explanation:

• Almost every site you visit will have what's called an RSS feed. This is just a way for you to get the content delivered to you, instead of you going to the site to get to the content.
• Using the technology of RSS, you can save a tremendous amount of time, because once you subscribe to a site's RSS feed, you can receive feeds delivered in a feed reader - and read all your favorite sites in one convenient place, instead of going all over the Web. That's where Bloglines comes in. Bloglines is a feed reader/content aggregator that allows you to read content from all your subscribed feeds in one simple to use interface.

How do I use Bloglines?

Couldn't be easier. Follow these steps:

• Create an account. It's free, and it takes about 15 seconds. You'll need to confirm your registration, so watch your email.
• Once you confirm your email, you'll be brought to a Subscribe page. This is a selection of Bloglines Quick Picks (arranged by subject), and the top fifty or so most popular Bloglines subscription feeds. Take some time here to see what you might be interested in.
• That's it! Once you've clicked the Subscribe button, you'll be whisked away to your own personal Bloglines reader.

That's the very basics of how Bloglines works. To add more feeds to your Bloglines reader, all you need to do is find a site you like, and then use the Bloglines Easy Subscribe Button to instantly pop it into your list of Bloglines subscriptions. I'll have more on Bloglines soon, but for now, this should get you started using Bloglines to streamline your Web searching.

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