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I'll thank my roommate for introducing me to bloglines.com because the concept of saving all of the blogs I wanted to track was a new one, and saved me a lot of time from opening lots of blogs from time to time having no idea when friends would write. But there was another benefit. Bloglines's recommendations introduced me to a few recommended sites and then, following links on some of these and on some of my writer friends from school, I've collected quite the list of blogs that help me keep up with the writing and reading world.

But there was one more benefit to bloglines. They had one of their own blogs, which they automatically subscribed me to, wherein they posted a self-congratulatory note about their success over Google Reader. Oh! Google does something like this too? Why yes, they do. So I held onto that for awhile, explored a little but didn't feel like transferring my long list over just to experiment. Finally, I decided to go ahead and try, so I transferred a few over, then messed around to see the features. Well, I have to say I like them better. Sorry bloglines. You were great for awhile. Thanks for the intro, but so long.

Fortunately, Google Reader has an import tool, and Bloglines has an export tool, so it wasn't such hard work as I'd thought to get them all transferred. And now I'm enjoying the good things about Google Reader with all the blogs I follow, and the more that I continue to add both from their recommendations and from those in emails and blogs I already get.

So, what are the differences? Bloglines allows you to save posts that you want for later. But, once you've clicked on the link and then leave, all of the posts in that blog are automatically marked as read. In Google Reader, you have to open each post to mark it as read, and you can also mark an opened one as unread. But also! You can star and share, email to others and tag. Also, you can scroll through the posts in a particular blog, and you can put certain blogs in folders. So I can group all the children's lit related blogs, for example, and then also group my friends--so I can keep things separate. It's pretty nice. I like that! You can also view in expanded view format, like Outlook, abbreviated or expanded email view. And you can even elect to view the past x number of posts whether you've marked them as read or not.

Bloglines might have these capabilities, but they were glaring out at me, and so Google Reader comes across to me as more user friendly. It's also handy since I have gmail, that I can click on the link at the top (where all the Google's other feature links are) to Reader, and go right there.

So, there you go. Have fun!