Several months ago, I wrote a comparison of Google Reader and Bloglines trying to figure out which one I would use. Well, almost 6 months have gone by and I am still using both.

And up until a couple of days ago I was still double-subscribed to most of my feeds. But then, a solution finally occured to me.

An epiphany of grand proportions!

Ok, no - not really. However, I did figure out what I liked the most of all about Google Reader beyond those features already mentioned - the Shared Feeds!

So as of Monday, I use Google Reader for shared feeds published by the likes of Robert Scoble and Eric Peterson and Bloglines for individual site feeds. There is still some overlap - how could there not be? But its far less, and so, far less annoying.

I’m going to get a recommended river of information on Google Reader and detail, detail, detail from bloglines - WIN WIN!

Update:

I just found this Firefox extension for Google Reader! If the GR team adds a blogroll type function, it will be all over!

Summary

I typically use two feed readers - Bloglines and Google Reader but I’m starting to feel like I need to consolidate on one, but which to choose?

Why all of the sudden am I feeling this monolithic need? Well, the other day, for the first time ever (I have tried sporadically over the last several months) I successfully exported my subscriptions from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. Previously, Google Reader had refused to recognize my Bloglines OPML file as valid.

So, now that I have my subscribed feeds duplicated on two services AND Google started reporting subscriber numbers last week, in all likelihood I look like two subscribers when I’m in fact one (the more things change yada, yada, yada…) - apologies to all my web analytics pals whose subscriber numbers are now deliberately inflated because of me.

what i like about bloglines

There are two main things that I find really helpful from Bloglines.

The Firefox Bloglines Toolkit Add On (not developed by Bloglines, but made possible because of their API). This add on will periodically poll Bloglines and notify me via a little red dot that I have new items to read.

The sharing feature which serves as my blogroll (yep, that one over on the right side).

what i like about google reader

Ease of use and ease of reading.

Seriously, the river of data view (all new posts) is awesome. I can quickly scan scores of posts and focus on the ones that are of interest to me. I also think that (but have no proof) that Google Reader does a better job of handling multimedia than does Bloglines. Most posts I read in GR I read there in situ because, for whatever reason, the readability is high whereas I find myself clicking through to the original post much more often when I’m in Bloglines.

In a perfect world, either Bloglines would improve their site usability (Frames, really? What year is this again?) and the readability of the posts or Google would add a similar sharing feature and a notifier add on for Firefox and then I’d have a relatively level field to choose against but until then who knows?

What do you think? Which reader do you use (if either) and which do you like better and why?

Today, I spent some time looking at the blogrolls of folks who have publicly subscribed to my blog via bloglines.

This is a great way to find blogs with related topics. Here are a few cool visualization blogs I found this way:

• Stat. Graphics & Data Vis.
• Data Mining
• Junk Charts

OH! So just to be blindingly obvious about how to do this (remember ‘Sharing the Wealth’ has a serious Duh! factor)

Check the right side of the header for any (yes any) blog that you have displayed in the right pane of bloglines…

…see where it says ‘## subscribers’? That’s a link that when you click on it shows you a list of all the public bloglines subscribers to that blog and from there you can go see their public blogrolls. It’s scent following at its best.