Bloggers can’t live without their feeds or feed readers. They are critical to providing an alternative way to get their blogs to their readers. Feeds are a powerful resource for tracking blogging subjects and industries, as well as who is blogging about what.
LeeAnn Prescott of HitWise takes a look at web-based feed readers and her findings might help you determine which feed reader might be your next web-based feed reader.
Bloggers who use FeedBurner have a general idea of the most popular feed readers based on their subscriber statistics. FeedBurner subscriber statistics on the Hitwise Blog show that Bloglines is by far the most popular feed reader, and Hitwise data also support this. The market share of US visits to Bloglines was 3 times greater than Rojo, its nearest competitive web-based feed reader…
…While comparing web-based feed readers is not a perfect measure of the true size of the feed-reading market, as it does not take into consideration client-based (i.e., NetNewsWire) or portal-based (i.e., My Yahoo!) feed readers, it can give us an indication of the popularity of blog consumption via feeds.
Bloglines continues to be the highest scoring web-based feed reader used to view my WordPress blog, out scoring the others by more than double on some days. Are you using Bloglines?
A good feed reader for me is one that gets me the information I need as fast and easily as possible, allowing quick scanning of titles and very brief excerpts so I can go down my very long list of news and information sources quickly. I don’t need pretty, and I don’t need gimmicks. I really don’t even need to do all my reading from within the browser, opening pages I want to spend more time on as I go. I want information and I want it fast.
I’ve tried Google Reader, Google’s Personalized Homepage, Firefox Sage, and many other methods for “easy” feed reading, and haven’t found one that I can truly say I’m enamored.
But what about you? How do you use your feed reader with your blogging? Are your feeds a direct source of inspiration and content for your blogs? Does it get the information you want to you in a format that is fast and easy to use? What would you change about your feed reader?
Tell me about your favorite feed reader. What do you like, what do you hate? Do you use a web-based feed reader? Or something else?
Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress, and is a long time support volunteer for WordPress. Lorelle travels too much and reports about life on the road in Taking Your Camera on the Road and covers family history and genealogy on Lorelle’s Family History, and writes for too many blogs, ezines, and magazines.
