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I'd been a Bloglines user for some time now, but the only things I used it for were for the smaller things like friend's blogs and things that didn't have a huge update frequency on the scale of, say, Digg or even Slashdot or Boingboing. For the bigger stuff that I checked daily, I went to the actual pages in sequence and at most kept a recent articles listing on my personalized Google page. I tested out readers and aggregators that ran locally on my machine but determined pretty quickly that it didn't serve my purposes because there wasn't a convenient way to sync between my home machine(s) and workstation. So Bloglines sufficed but the interface was just clumsy enough that I only used it for a "here's what's updated" list.

Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.

Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.

One aggregator to rule them all.