I guess I don’t do much tracking of dog related sites… I did like the features / concepts of dogster (http://www.dogster.com/) but have not spent much time there.

Hopefully it is in the pipeline.

I too am loving Google Reader. I’ve just started playing with adding tags to individual posts and want to find certain posts to tag. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that GOOGLE Reader doesn’t have a search feature. Am I missing something or is it just not there?

OK, Alan, after reading your post, I agree that 3 minutes isn’t really enough time to give GR a fair trial. So I’ve played with it for a few days and now I’m basically switching over from Bloglines. I really like that it only marks as read the ones you’ve read. Lesson learned. Thanks!

That said, I do think it is not possible to suss out all the feature of a web application in a few minutes, especially comparing what is essentially new and different to what is familiar. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate, always have been for Bloglines, and their new features like the “playlists” are interesting.

That said, Google Reader offers more fleixble categorizing for your feed sets, by both folders and adding tags to a feed- what you cannot do in Bloglines is associate a single feed source with more than one folder (like I could have Stephen Downes in both my “Ed Tech” folder and my “Cool Canadians” folder.

I find paging down through feeds in Bloglines very tedious, and to swith from a summary to a headline view, requires a trip to a feeed’s preferences. In Google Reader, you can quickly toggle between these 2 views. I am using the headline views, and simply by pressing the “j” key, one story opens in detail sequentially.

Also what I am liking in Google Reader is I can have my feed lists on the left be visible only if there is new news, making the list shorter, as there is no reason for me to scan a feed if I have already read or marked as read the feeds.

These may be minor points, and not much of a difference, and I am not ready to crown one as champion. Bloglines does have the ability to do somke tracking to see how many others are subscribing to your feeds, which can be handy. I keep my bloglines account running just to keep a list of all my feeds, especially if I should ever quickly need an OPML (then again, Google Reader gives me that now).

So go with whateter works best for you and dont take my words as gospel…..

My preferred reading posture is also coffee cup in LEFT hand, right index finder poised above PgDn key. I know that there’s a keyboard shortcut in Bloglines for “next article”, but I’d rather do a screen at a time.

jrh