Kinja

No, it's not an appetizer, it's a new weblog aggregator. According to Kinja, here are the benefits of using their service:

1. keep up with favorite authors, and friends who blog
2. discover new weblogs
3. save time: scan excerpts before clicking through
4. legible excerpts, rather than a list of headlines, or a garbled search result
5. no knowledge of RSS or syndication standards required
6. no reader application to download, accessible from any computer
7. favorites page easily shared with friends and colleagues

Bear in mind that Kinja is still in beta, so there are (hopefully) updates to the service forthcoming. Essentially what Kinja does is to take all of the feeds from the blogs you designate and turn them into a single, digested web page. My one main gripe is that they insert "sponsored links" into my digested page (I do understand that they have to fund it somehow, but that doesn't mean I have to like it).

Here's my Kinja digest page. One royally pain was trying to get everything from my BlogLines account into Kinja. I exported my BlogLines to an XML file, and tried to import using Kinja. Kinja told me that my file was not formatted using the appropriate OPML structure -- I don't know whether to blame Kinja, to blame BlogLines, or blame both of them.

One thing that's interesting to compare between BlogLines and Kinja is their "blogrolling" functions. My BlogLines public page presents you with a listing of all the blogs I monitor while the Kinja page is showing you digested posts from blogs that have updated recently. If you want to specifically know what blogs I am monitoring in Kinja, it's sort of a scavenger hunt. Note: I took the time to paste in all of the same blogs from BlogLines so that I am comparing apples to apples.

Kinja has the same kind of bookmarklet as BlogLines that you can toss onto your browser "Links" bar to allow you to quickly add blogs to your subscriptions.

I'll play around more with Kinja and let you know further thoughts tomorrow.

One final note -- Kinja doesn't display as much information in the digest as I would like to see before I decide whether or not to "Read the rest," and there does not appear to be a way to change the display options. Additionally, I like being able to group my blogs by category in BlogLines, an option Kinja does not seem to support.