Keeping up with events

I'm always looking for time-saving tools, and my latest find is Bloglines (www.bloglines.com). I discovered this phenomenally useful site just a few weeks ago, but now I find myself consulting it several times a day to follow news for this column and to track other areas of interest.

Bloglines is what is known as a "news aggregator," meaning it collects news feeds from various sites to present you with a one-stop information spot. Feeds are based on RSS or Rich Site Summary (also known as Really Simple Syndication), developed by Netscape as a way to distribute content without the user having to go to a particular Web page.

When a site publishes stories, updates or discussions using RSS, users with news aggregator software can download new material and see what has changed since their last visit.

There is no limit on how many sites you can subscribe to, making it possible to see in one place the changed content on tens or hundreds of interesting sites. A news aggregator thus streamlines how you track favorite Web pages and means you can follow more of them. I keep up with more than 120 news services and Weblogs this way.

And although there are many news aggregator programs out there, most of them -- such as NewzCrawler (www.newzcrawler.com) or NetNewsWire (ranchero.com/netnewswire/) for the Mac -- are disk-based; i.e., you download them and run them on your own machine. Bloglines is a Web-based aggregator. Once you've registered for this free service, you see all your news and Weblog feeds in a slick two-pane window that's easy to modify.

I've set up a hierarchy of folders for my work, grouping feeds from places such as InfoWorld and CNET into a folder for use in this column, while putting feeds from Scientific American and other science sources into their own folder. I go back and forth between these and my other folders as the day progresses and new content comes in.

To decide which news feeds to subscribe to, I used the directory available at the site, trying things on to see whether they would be of any use. Some of these feeds are professionally edited; others are the musings of authors or people with an axe to grind. It doesn't take long to discover your own favorites -- my list is top-heavy with computer news sources but also long on current events.

I was fascinated, for example, to learn that blogs have taken hold in Iraq in a big way. I now follow the fortunes of a Baghdad dentist named Zeyad, a Sunni who regularly reports on the U.S. occupation and its battles against the resistance, which he calls "a resistance not to expel foreign occupiers from Iraq, but to expel Iraq from the map." Not all Iraqi blogs are as pro-democracy as Zeyad's, but all offer a valuable window into that country.

Having found a site like Zeyad's "Healing Iraq" (healingiraq.blogspot.com), I was able to add it to my Bloglines feeds by using a handy toolbar item the site makes available. Any time you're looking at a site that offers RSS capabilities, you can click on the toolbar to add it to your subscriptions. Weblogs link to each other, so an interest in a topic quickly leads to other feeds.

My usual objection to Web-based services is that they can be slow, but Bloglines brings me the news as snappily as if it resided on my own computer. I can access the service from any Internet-connected PC and don't have the disk or bandwidth overhead of running an aggregator program locally. With this kind of bang for the buck, Bloglines continues to climb on my list of indispensable Web sites.