Discovering Blogs - 2. Keeping Track of Blogs You Like

You’ve got your favourite blogs that you like to read and as you surf through the net, you may come across new blogs you want to come back to. How do you keep track of them all?

The basic way

Many people I’ve spoken to put the links to their favourite blogs as a Favourite on their toolbar. That works well enough. But there’s no way of knowing if the blog you are following has been updated and you have to move from blog to blog as you read since a click on the Favourite link takes you straight to the actual blog page. You can arrange them in folders by topic but the navigation of the folders and blog lists gets a bit clunky as your favourite blog collection grows.

The streamlined way

This is where blog or news “readers” (aka “aggregators”) come in. You sign up for an online account and it collects all the blogs that you like in one online space. It looks rather like an online email account (eg if you’ve ever had a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, the layout is similar). On the left hand pane, you will find a list of your favourite blogs while the larger right hand pane is the reading pane where you can read the posts.

The advantage is that you have all your favourite blogs in one space and you can read them via the one window without having to jump about in and out of different blogs. You can also sort your blogs into different folders or topics rather like having different folders for your emails. Mine are sorted into “writing”, “malaysia”, “technology” etc. You can also add newspapers to your reader. And some readers will show you clearly which blogs / news sites have been updated since you last read them - again like your email programme that shows unread items in bold.

There are various blog reader/ aggegator services including Yahoo, Bloglines and Google Reader. Yahoo Mail Beta adds a blog reader folder into your online email account if you’re already signed up to their email service. Bloglines has a good folder management system. Google Reader uses “tags” instead of folders and has the function that can show only those blogs that have updated since the last visit.

All you then have to do is add the blog reader to your favourites in your toolbar and click on that to go to the reader to read all the blogs you are following.

Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can “subscribe” to the blogs you like. There is usually a button you can drag onto your tool bar for one-click subscribing - when you are on any page of a blog, just click on that button and it automatically adds that blog to your reader. You can “unsubscribe” by deleting the blog from your reader.

Note that a reader works by detecting a feed from the site (see What is a Feed?). If the site does not have a feed, it won’t be able to add it to the reader. Most public blogs have feeds - those that don’t either have the feed switched off or they are private blogs. “Static” websites that do not update regularly like blogs do not have feeds.

The email notification way

Some blogs offer an email notification service whenever they are updated. This should be free and be sure to check that they won’t use your email address for any other purpose. You should also be able to unsubscribe anytime. Once you’ve signed up, an email will be sent to you whenever the blog is updated, with the full or partial text of the post(s).

The advantage is that you can access your favourite blogs via your email Inbox. The disadvantage is that if you subscribe to many blogs, you could get notification overload. But some blogs give a reward for signing up for email notification - like I do over on my other blog Fusion View (subcribers get a chance to win books from a prize draw) - so it may be worth choosing email subscription for a select few blogs.

Further Reading:

• Discovering Blogs - 1. How to find blogs to read
• Beginner’s Guide
• What is…? (Jargon Buster)