I actually chose to set up a Google newsreader on the recommendation of a presenter at MLA's annual conference. He found Google's was easier to manage because the old posts stay there in case you want to reference them, whereas on Bloglines the old ones "drop off." So even if you haven't read them yet, if you log on to your Bloglines reader, you might end up having entries marked as read and dropped in the cyber corbeille. Maybe if I get a chance I'll set up one in Bloglines, too, so I can compare.
I think I now understand where the authority rating comes from: it's from how many times the blog is linked to by other sites. I think I remember Chris Anderson at MLA talking about this a bit. He blogged about his upcoming book for two years--essentially writing it on-line. When the book came out, he asked his blog subscribers for reviews. He got 740 reviews on the 800 free copies he sent out; these linked to Amazon and drove sales of his book. So the power of a blog is in how many times it's linked to.
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