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BlogRovR - A new way to read
September 7, 2007

The idea behind RSS is to bring together in one place updated content from the sites you read. BlogRovR goes one better on this and has the content follow you around during your regular web browsing. By installing this free Firefox extension (Download required, works on Windows/Mac/Linux computers using the Firefox browser) users will get pop-out updates from BlogRovR when there is a blog post in their list of favorite blogs about a site they are viewing.

Obviously, there is a certain level of privacy that you have to be willing to give up to use this tool. But then again, if you are reading this blog post then you have already given up your privacy. Since you have pretty much no privacy online anyway, why not get some benefits for your loss? Just to imagine a bit...something I would love to see is something like BlogRovR, but hooked into a library catalog. Then, when you are browsing, maybe something like a BookRover could use the meta information for the site and do a concurrent search to find books and articles to extend the subject being browsed.

As it is now, I am rather liking BlogRovR. It won't replace a primary reader like Google Reader as a way to read individual blog feeds, but it isn't supposed to. BlogRovR clearly labels their tool as a supplement to a blog reader. I think it would also be a great way to ease into the practice of blog reading.

Thanks to Brian Mayer, newly hired at the School Library System where I am director, for sharing BlogRovR with me.

Posted by Chris Harris on September 7, 2007 | Comments (1)