The Bottom Line
Unfortunately, BlogBridge does not exploit its potential (free-form tagging and smart folders) fully.
Pros
- BlogBridge makes it easy and fun to discover interesting feeds
- Organizing feeds is a snap, you can tag items, search quickly and create smart folders
- BlogBridge can automatically synchronize multiple installations
Cons
- BlogBridge's smart folders could be, well, smarter
- You cannot read all items from all feeds in a group in one go
- BlogBridge does not integrate with Bloglines, NewsGator Online and other web-based services
Description
- BlogBridge is an RSS feed reader plus net-based service.
- You can organize feeds in Guides and set up smart feeds that collects items based on your criteria.
- Smart feeds can also search blog and other search engines to aggregate relevant stories.
- BlogBridge comes with pre-populated guides, and can suggest new feeds based on what you read.
- You can tag feeds and articles, fully integrating with del.icio.us social bookmarks.
- BlogBridge lets you define keywords, which are highlighted in articles.
- A cleanup wizard helps you remove stale feeds you never look at as well as old items.
- You can subscribe to other people's subscriptions via OPML in BlogBridge.
- BlogBridge supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
Guide Review - BlogBridge 2.15 - RSS News Feed Reader
Bridges combine the practical and the symbolic in an exemplar manner. They are a bridges between the real world and the meaning that world has for those dealing with it.BlogBridge, too, wants to be a bridge, not only between you and the world of RSS feeds, which connect you to newspapers, blogs and podcasts, but also between a simple and easily accessible interface and a rich set of features. BlogBridge succeeds at making RSS sufficiently simple. When you first launch BlogBridge, you can select a number of "guides", collections of thematically arranged and pre-selected blogs and news sources. Adding your own favorites to them is easy, and BlogBridge can make decent suggestions based on what you read.
Via "reading lists", you can subscribe to other people's subscriptions. Using a star system, you can rate individual feeds (used for filtering and sorting, for example). BlogBridge even assigns a rating to each feed based on several criteria itself. Using its own service, BlogBridge, which using Java Web Start runs on many platforms, can keep multiple installations in sync.
Unfortunately, BlogBridge does not integrate with Bloglines and other web aggregators for synchronization, though. More flexibility when it comes to reading, archiving and organizing news inside BlogBridge would be nice, too. You can tag items, for example, with full del.icio.us integration, but cannot really make use of these tags in BlogBridge's smart folder criteria. Search, again, works well.
