Why are blogs different than regular websites?
(or A Brief Introduction to Accessing Blogs through RSS) ParT II
What you first see when you load the Bloglines page is a 'public' view of a personal RSS aggregator. Typically you would have your own login account at Bloglines, or have an aggregator installed on your own desktop machine, but Bloglines is special in that it allows you to give the public a view of what is normally private.
On the right hand side is a list of the blog RSS 'feeds' you can read in this aggregator.
Click on the first one on the list, in this case June Lester's 'Afterhours' feed. The actual contents of the feed will appear in the right-hand pane. You can compare what you see here with June's actual website.
As another example, click on the link that says "Blogtalk." What you see is the RSS feed for this very site. If you wanted to, you could spend the next 2 weeks never 'coming' to this site, but instead having only the new posts 'sent' to you in an aggregator.
So far this likely seems fairly uneventful, and not a lot better than visiting the actual website itself, in fact maybe even less so. Where RSS aggregation really shines is in dealing with multiple information sources on a regular basis. Click on the link at the top of the left-hand pane that reads "etugblogs's Subscriptions."
What you then see in the right-hand pane is the content from each of the facilitator's blog sites, aggregated together in one single page. Even more powerfully, if you had an account on this Bloglines service, you would see only those 'stories' that were new since the last time you checked. Each time you came back, this aggregated page would show you only the posts in the feeds that had changed since you last checked.