Recently my long love affair with Bloglines has been hitting the rocks. I’ve been seeing another RSS reader. Yes, it’s Google Reader.

It started on the bus to work. You see, the mobile version of Bloglines doesn’t do it for me. My ‘morning paper’, now, is to scroll through the headlines from the dozens of blogs I subscribe to – in Google Reader mobile. If it’s something I might want to return to later, I ‘star’ it. If the blog post supports it, I might even bookmark it on del.icio.us.

When I get into work one of my browser homepages is Google Reader – I follow up on any starred items.

But one RSS reader is not enough. My second homepage is Bloglines.

Whereas Google Reader simply gives me a lucky dip of recent posts from the two hundred-plus feeds I subscribe to, Bloglines is organised: I only look at my top five blogs in ten categories: UK online journalism blogs, US OJ blogs, technology news, media news, and so on. You could call it my ‘local’ newspaper.

(note: That top-5-in-10 categories tip came from colleague Andrew Dubber, music industry blogger and co-founder of 5alist.com, where, not coincidentally, you can create, share and comment on top five lists. Cute idea.)

As if that isn’t enough, I have a third RSS reader: TailRank. You can import your feeds into TailRank and set it to only display the posts that have 10 or more incoming links. That’s my Sunday newspaper: the quality I’ve missed during the week.

So. Three RSS readers – one general, one local, and one quality. How about you? Which ones do you use – and how do you use them?

PHP Freelancer