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.