My Internet usage habit
Today, my entire window the web is Bloglines, a neat and nifty web-based RSS feedreader which I have been using for an year now. I guess I have I have about 200 odd feeds configured in it (of which not all are read on a daily basis - I have a Favorites folder of about 25 feeds that I catch up with daily, the rest when possible).
In almost all cases I have stopped visiting the various web sites like News.com or Economictimes.com etc. Since these sites provide RSS Feeds, I just add these to my Bloglines list and then most of my interaction with the content is through Bloglines. Add to this a list of good blogs that I catch up regularly with (Emergic.org, Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, Om Malik on Broadband, Paidcontent.org) … I have little or no reason on most days to surf any other site other than through Bloglines ! Further, being a great fan and user of Firefox, the uber-cool browser from the Mozilla guys, I use their Livelines extension to add new feeds that I come across directly to Bloglines straight from the Firefox interface. I have also gotten very used to the Bookmarks toolbar of Firefox wherein I have my most frequently visited sites lined up (things like Gmail, Sify.com, Bloglines, My Photoblog as well as nifty Javascript hacks aka Bookmarklets that let me add pages to del.icio.us without any hassles). I have never been the kind of user who would use Browser bookmarks or Address bar history to go to sites that I have already visited.
The entire ritual of exploring new sites is almost fully through del.icio.us wherein I have subscribed to the RSS feeds of the tags of my interest (Broadband, Firefox etc) and through the del.icio.us Popular links feed By all means, today, I can manage most of my browser related activity without the Address bar !!! (worst case I have the integrated Google search box in Firefox) - thanks to Bloglines and del.icio.us
With the recent acquisition of Bloglines by Ask Jeeves I only hope that they dont screw things up at Bloglines and make me start my search for the perfect RSS reader again …