Though I’m on the web quite often, I’m far from where I want to be on the technology tip. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I really understood the value of web feeds and how they could make my internet experience a lot more efficient.

In the past when I wanted to surf the web, I’d hit my favorite websites like Electronic Village, or CNN Politics, or Dallas Progress, but I could never get to all of them in one sitting. Once I started using a feed reader, I was able to find out when ALL of my favorite websites update their content.

This is much better than using bookmarks because you may or may not get new information when you go to a bookmarked page.  When you visit your feed reader, you don’t have to worry about revisiting old data, unless you want to.  It also keeps you from missing anything if you don’t get around to visiting your favorite site for a while.

I use Bloglines to aggregate my feeds. That means Bloglines keeps a log of my favorite websites and tells me when they are updated. It’s not just blogs, but mainstreams sites like CNN, USA Today, and Politico as well.

There are plenty of other good feed readers including Google Reader, Pageflakes, and more. I’ve found Bloglines to be very easy for me so I stick with it. Now I’m tracking 50 websites at the same time and the reader compiles (aggregates) all of them in one place and only shows me the updates since I last viewed them.

So check out Bloglines or any other reader, but make sure to subscribe to my feed (http://dallassouthblog.com/feed) when you do.