Those Little Badgie Dealies

I'm a little bewildered by the little badgie dealies on a blog.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I'm totally clear what they do; I'm bewildered about why I would push one, and "subscribe" to somebody's blog.

I mean, to what annoying place would said feed be fed?

I loathe the idea of this stuff appearing in the inbox of my email. But other people don't. "One Inbox For Everthing" is an ideal for some people. Maybe there are other ways as well...

What the blogger does to add the badge dealies

I'm using blogspot so, I added several on a little pick list by adding a widget. Presumably there is a similar procedure for the other free hosting sites.

So dithering about which to bless with my business is sort of out of my hands (which is fine by me, for now.) These include:

• Google Reader-- Google itself has a feed aggregator client. Who knew? I didn't. Is this the same or different from iGoogle?
• Bloglines -- apparently more bloggy in focus?
• Netvibes
• Newsgator-- "business value through social computing"... That sounds grim.

Now what the hell are these things? They are "Personal Start Pages". (Actually, making up the names for whole new categories of software thingum is a real problem. I would have called them "news aggregators" I guess.) Seriously, I had only a theoretical understanding that such a thing had to exist.

Anyway, for the less sophisticated blogster, the question of what to do seems to be done for you. I suppose the more sophisticated, codey blogster will get a code snippet from the aggregator. 

What the reader does

The reader, the person I mean, has an account with one or more of the above services, and receives the feed. Alternatively, they acquire a "RSS feed reader" that is to their taste, a client program like a specialized browser. (There was a time when people used other things for internet clients besides a browser. Yes, it's true.)