I don't know how you read blogs.  For that matter, I don't know what you do if, like me, you get most of your news, even if from mainstream media outlets, via online sources rather than more traditional instruments such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

If you've even glanced at the links on my site, I'm sure you noticed that there are a lot of blog links.  I read those blogs regularly, as I previously mentioned.  I get a large amount of my news from blogs in addition to other online outlets.

The only problem with this approach is that there is a tremendous amount of information to be consumed this way, making it virtually impossible to actually visit each site and peruse their new content.  Well, it might be different if I were independently wealthy and had nothing but spare time on my hands, but that's not the case.

So how does one get a handle on the volumes of online information one wishes to consume on a regular basis?

The answer is a news aggregator.  It's an ingenious creation which allows someone like me to use a single software client to pull news from many disparate sources, compile it all in a single place, quickly determine what at each source I've not read yet, and quickly glance through the recently added content.  In many cases, depending on what kind of aggregator used, all of this can be done without ever opening a browser window.

Many web sites, including blogs and traditional news outlets, offer web syndication feeds using protocols such as RSS, Atom and RDF.  xenogere offers them as well; you can find them via the available syndication feeds page.

That's how I stay on top of the vast majority of blogs that I read in addition to more traditional news providers.

So what aggregator do I use?

Currently I'm utilizing SharpReader.  I've not yet decided whether this is the aggregator I will continue using since I'm still testing several flavors to see what works best for me, but I'm thus far quite happy with this one — despite its interface idiosyncrasies which can make it a bit cumbersome to work with.  But nothing is perfect and, as I said, I'm still testing to find the right client for me.

SharpReader allows me to aggregate posts, headlines, and, for those sites which offer the feeds, even comments.  I can quickly peruse updated or new information from these sites.  Depending on the type of feed, I'm able to either read a quick excerpt of the information to help determine if I want to see the whole thing or actually see the whole thing in the aggregator.  Either way, I can quickly jump to the browser version of the information on the site by double-clicking the entry in SharpReader.  That's useful if the feed only supplies excerpts or if I want to leave a comment directly on the site in question.

Either way, it's a lot easier than trying to visit each and every site to see what's new.  The aggregator essentially provides an e-mail like interface for consuming web-based information.