My pick for this year's best productivity booster is probably Bloglines.com. Bloglines is a free RSS feed aggregator. Most blog and news sites provide RSS or Atom feeds. With a Bloglines account, you can "subscribe" to as many feeds as you wish to follow and Bloglines will track new articles and present them to you as "unread" articles. It is presented in a way very similar to how we see our unread email.
No longer do I have to manually visit each of my regular sites and determine what information is new and what I've already read. Although this sounds like it doesn't take much time, it does add up. Now, I can just go to bloglines.com and all of the new articles are there for me to scan at my own pace. Feeds are scanned regularly and new articles are displayed automatically.
You can select to view articles as titles only, summaries or in their entirety. Hyperlinks to the actual article are provided as well. Articles can be marked as unread, etc., similar to managing email.
Not only does this save time from not having to navigate to multiple web sites, new articles are pulled regularly and it makes it easier to avoid unproductive web surfing. For busy people that frequent multiple news or blog sites, a feed aggregator is a must.
What sets Bloglines apart from other aggregators is that it presents new articles like unread email, rather than as a list of articles without old articles screened out. It can be used to follow any site that offers a feed, including photo sharing accounts (i.e., Flickr.com), shopping sites (i.e., dealspl.us), career sites (i.e., dice.com) and many others.
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