What’s an aggregator?

If you’re new to blogging like I am, you may not be familiar with aggregators. Simply put, they are a way to view many blogs at once.

For example, my aggregator has 27 subscriptions in it – each subscription is for a site. Rather than having to visit all 27 sites to see if anything new is posted, I can pull up the aggregator and it will list them out, kind of like this:
– Joe Bob’s Site (nothing new)
– Big Bob’s Site (1 new item)
– Little Bob’s Site (5 new items)
– Daddy Bob’s Site (nothing new)
etc…

There are two primary kinds of aggregators – software based and web based. Software based aggregators are programs that you install on your computer. After you install it, you tell it what sites you want it to keep an eye on, and that’s it! The problem for me is that I check blogs from two different computers, and I don’t want each one keeping a separate list of what is new to me. For example, my laptop might way that Big Bob’s Site has “1 new item”. So I read it. Now Big Bob’s Site has “nothing new”. But when I get on my other computer, it’ll say that Big Bob’s Site has “1 new item” again, since I haven’t read it on that computer yet. There may be software out there that deals with this issue, but I haven’t found it.

So, I’m using a web based aggregator. It works very similar to the software based aggregator, but instead of loading a program on your computer, you just create an account on the aggregator website, and then view it from any computer. This way it doesn’t matter where I read the items from – it keeps track of it all in one place. To use the above example, if Big Bob’s Site has “1 new item” and I read it from my laptop, and then I log in from my desktop it will say “nothing new” because it knows I already read that item. It’s not a big deal when you’re keeping up with a few blogs, but as your collection grows it can get tougher to keep up with.

I’m sure there are a lot of web based aggregators out there, but the one I like the best is Bloglines. It’s simple, it’s free, and it’s fast. Check it out.

As I said before, I’m pretty new at this whole blogging thing. If anything I said in here doesn’t make sense (or isn’t accurate), please leave a comment and let me know.