In order to make my news-reading process less time consuming, I’ve now switched from NetNewsWire running all the time on my PowerBook to the Bloglines web service primarily used through my Nokia 770 handheld browser.

Why use Bloglines? There are some good reasons:

1. Bloglines centralizes RSS feed fetching, making news reading less bandwidth-intensive
2. It centralizes information of what items I have read, meaning that I see only unread things whether I use my Mac, my 770, or some other computer at a client
3. their subscription sharing system enables me to easily back up my subscription list as OPML. Even if Bloglines shut their service tomorrow, only thing I would lose would be information on which items I’ve read and which not

If the news items contain something interesting I will want to return to later or blog about, I can bookmark it using my del.icio.us account. The del.icio.us bookmarks used to be synchronized with my own site, but this isn’t operational at the moment.

Making things work even better

In ideal world I would be able to do most of this offline. I would connect my 770 to the net before leaving home and synchronize the news there. Then I could read the news in bus or over breakfast, and bookmark the interesting items.

There is an offline Bloglines client for Nokia 770, but it is still at quite early staging and crashes quite often.

Similarly, there is a quite nice del.icio.us client, but as far as I know it doesn’t support saving bookmarks while offline.

If these two issues would be resolved, I would have a quite perfect news-reading and research setup.