BlogBridge, a second look

BlogBridge might still be a little too rough around the edges to de-throne NetNewsWIre - the web's most popular newsreader on either Windows or OS X - but it has a rocking feature set that I think the folks at Ranchero/Newsgator had better start paying attention to. C.K. took a look at a 1.0 release of BlogBridge a while ago, and I think it's safe to say the app, now at version 2.7, has come quite a ways since then. The installation went smoothly, and signing up for BlogBridge's free web-based syncing service was easy, which brings me to one of BlogBridge's strong features: the app can not only sync newsfeeds, headlines and even preferences with a free, web-based newsreading service, but you can categorize newsfeeds with tags and sync those tags with del.icio.us.

Since I have such a huge library of categorized feeds, one seemingly minor feature I really appreciate about BlogBridge is the ability to assign custom icons to the feed categories, making them much more easy to identify when trying to find just the right one. BlogBridge has quite a few other tricks up its sleeve, such as feed-rating and smartfeeds, which can pull keywords from your own feeds or parse tags and keywords from other services like Amazon, Feedster, Flickr, Google and Technorati.

All in all, once some kinks get ironed out I think BlogBridge shows some real promise. It's is available as a free download, and since it's java and open source it runs on OS X, Linux and Windows.