Soccer Dad

Bloglines

Although I've long had a cute graphic and link to Bloglines I really hadn't used its potential. I just learned some interesting uses for it.
First and foremost it appears to be an RSS reader. You can use it to subscribe to your favorite blogs or other media published on the internet.
Of special interest: you can use it to syndicate the New York Times and Washington Post. How?
Set up a bloglines account. When you do, click on the "My feeds" tab.
When you're there click the add button. In the right pane a window will open prompting you to subscribe to a blog or RSS feed. Now for the NY Times ...
Go to http://www.nytimes.com and scroll down to the bottom where it says "Add New York Times RSS feeds" and click on the orange button that is labelled "XML." Right click on the XML button corresponding to whichever feed you wish to subscribe to and then Copy the shortcut. Return to bloglines, paste the URL into the text box and click on Subscribe. That's it.
The best part is that the links that Bloglines generates have code in them that allows the links to be free even after a week when regular links are redirected to the paid archive. Take for example William Safire's "Sharon the Optimist" or "Sharon the Optimist."
The other way to get a similar permanent link is to use New York Times Link Generator or New York Times: Latest Headlines.
Of course, if as Instapundit reports (quoting Business Week) that the Times might start charging for all of its online content then this won't help.
A similar process can be followed for the Washington Post. Of course older links don't get re-directed at the Post (yet), so using the RSS feed may not have the same benefit.
UPDATE: Presence adds that if you use blogdigger for a search, you can subscribe to that search as it will continually update the results by subscribing to the search. After your search right click on the XML button and add the search results as a blog feed too.