Bloglines vs. Google Reader

Being very new to this whole "feed reader" scene, I tended to see more similarities than differences between Bloglines and Google Reader this past week. Both were very easy to set up and conveniently displayed all of the feeds I had subscribed to. I was disappointed that neither automatically showed the comments of each blog post. (I tried playing around with the different settings to see if this is an option in either service, but couldn't find it. Please, someone, alert me if I'm mistaken in this!)

The differences I did notice are as follows:

• Bloglines has a bit of a "cleaner" interface.
• Google Reader has links to all your other Google services which makes for a more cluttered screen
• Blogger posts appear in one's Google Reader faster than in his or her Bloglines reader. (I just noticed this difference today, Sunday, 9/28, with Steve's latest announcement...it's already showing in Google Reader but has yet to be picked up by Bloglines.)
• Google Reader puts a date/time stamp at the top rt corner of each entry (and does the math for you, letting you know how long ago a post was written) while Bloglines dates each post under the entry. GR's method highlights newer posts.
• Bloglines allows readers either to display all posts from each feed or to show only those posted in the last hour, past 6 hours, past 12 hours, day, 2 or 3 days, week or month. This is convenient if one only wants to see the latest entries.

Blogger vs. LiveJournal

My fellow classmates, JH & JF:

Forgive me for taking until nearly the final hour to get this final post posted this week! I honestly had a bit of difficulty determining many differences between Blogger and LiveJournal (apart from the obvious, annoying & obnoxious overuse of ads in LJ!) Whenever I made note of some feature I thought was unique to one platform, I’d dig around a bit in the other to, lo and behold, find that it offered a similar feature as well.

Here’s a summary of the differences I was finally able to ascertain:

Blogger:
~Very easy to set up and use
~Clean interface
~Can also be posted to via txt messaging and email
~Comment notifications can be sent via email
~Can customize with HTML editor
~Ability to set up a “team blog” with multiple authors
~Automatic save feature


LiveJournal:
~Main emphasis seems to be on “creating communities”; lots of encouragement to find journals of those who have similar interests as yours
~Easy to set up and use (yet not, IMHO, as simple & straightforward as Blogger)
~3 levels of account types: Basic, Plus & Paid: http://www.livejournal.com/site/accounts.bml
~Plus account pages are littered with many distracting ads
~Can also be posted to via txt messaging, email AND voice (5/month on plus plan; 20/month on paid)
~Comment notifications can be sent via email, text message and IM
~Can customize layouts with CSS
~Lots of (also imho “gimmicky”) features: users can pick different “userpics” to display on each post, users can set their mood for (and get a LiveJournal-generated emoticon attached to) each post, posts can be marked as “memories” as well as others (such as, in the paid version, setting “background music” to one’s journal)