Today I want to present you my favorite web-based RSS reader, and one of my favorite web services overall. I'm talking about Ask's Bloglines.

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Being the simple as it is, Bloglines "shields" you from the confusion of news feed standards such as RSS, Atom, and others - it all works automatically with Bloglines.

Plus, it is not only a reader. Bloglines provides you with the tools you need to begin creating your own clip blogs and blogrolls.

Key features:

• All-in-one Blog and news feed search, online subscriptions, news reader, blog publishing and social sharing tools
• Available in 10 languages
• Mobile version optimized for handheld computers and cell phones
• Email subscriptions help manage your e-newsletter traffic
• Quick Pick Subscriptions get new users started quickly and easily
• Bookmarklet for single-click subscriptions to any source
• Notifiers for all browser types to remind you when new articles have arrived
• Handy add-on tools for bloggers such as automated blogrolls, subscription buttons

Again, Bloglines is easy to use, it's free and if you don't have one - get yourself an account.

A few words about Google's response to one of the biggest challenges of the modern Web - blogging.

Blogger is a blogging service founded by Pyra Labs (which, according to the looks of their site, seems to have its existence defined by Blogger alone) in 1999, and acquired by Google in 2003. By joining the family of Google services, Blogger emerged as a powerful tool, and found its place in the Google's conception of the world.

If you already have a Google account, creating your new blog on Blogger will not take you more than a minute. You will be asked to name your blog, choose its address and the template it will appear in (12 templates available). After that, you find yourself in front of a fancy WYSIWYG editor heavily loaded with JavaScript, and all other features you need to manage your blog. Besides the touch of simple elegance, characteristic for every product signed by Google, you will soon find that there are some other interesting points about Blogger, worth being noticed.

First of all (don't know why I mind about this, but I find it funny) - integration. With other Google services and applications, for example. You may think it's of a minor importance, but you cannot deny that having a tool such as Picassa or Google Toolbar by your side when writing a post might come in handy. Then, there is the possibility of posting by email, or directly from MS Word (through a plug-in, for now). And I just have to mention the cute Ajax-based interface for (re)designing your template. And so on…

One thing begins to puzzle me: why is almost all stuff made by Google still in beta?

Let me tell you about Movable Type (in the case you don't already know it, that is).

Movable Type is a web publishing (blogging and content management) platform. As a blogging platform, it supports (guess) all the most popular blogging features: user accounts, comments, categories, themes and so on, and like all of its decent competitors it is extensible through third-party plug-ins.

Enough with formalities. What makes Movable Type different from the others? Here is a short version of how I see it:

1. They have invented TrackBack. You know, that little handy functionality that connects blogs by sending a sign (known as "ping") to any blog you make a link to in your post. It first appeared in Movable Type 2.2, and is now a standard functionality adopted by everyone.
2. It is developed in Perl. One could say that, given Movable type is supposed to manipulate words (mostly), Perl looks like the most logical solution. On the other hand, tendencies seem to move in the other direction.
3. Movable Type supports several database management systems: MySQL, Berkeley DB, PostgreSQL, SQLite.
4. It is not entirely free. The only free licence granted by the editor is for personal, non commercial use. Other licences, for commercial, education and non-for-profit purposes, are charged from $40 to $300, depending on conditions. Notice however that a full support is included in every payable licence.
5. According to the editor, the first version of Movable Type was downloaded 100 times in the first hour following its publishing. Interesting detail, especially given that there is no online demo of the product.

Finally, if you need a proof that Movable Type is a respectable application, consider the fact that General Motors and Stanford University (among many others) have chosen it to implement their blogs. Fair enough.

As you can probably see for yourself, we at 2DozenCents find blogging an important phenomenon and don't hesitate to write about it. So far, we've presented two of the most popular destinations for finding interesting blogs and blog posts - Technorati and Sphere. However, with few dozen million blogs on the Web, it's useful to have a guide to find the best. That's why I'm presenting 9rules today.

The 9rules Network (also known as only 9rules) is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. 9rules is started to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

Any blogger can join 9rules when submission rounds occur (follow 9rules' blog for this), as long as he/she produces great content and updates it regularly. 9rules members benefit from increased traffic to their blog and skill improvements, and are therefore eager to join.

To conclude - if you're looking for great blogs to read, visit 9rules - you'll surely find them there.

Yet another social bookmarking service. Simpy is easy to use, light, nice looking and - simple. What else can you expect?

Start with the looks: Devoid of any useless graphical elements or fancy heavy-weight visual decorations, Sympy still manages to stay pretty pleasant for the eye. You get your content on the full page, no headers, no side menus, sub-menus or anything similar, which significantly increases the overall visibility of your bookmarks.

Talking features, there's everything a decent bookmarking service should have: saving bookmarks, tagging bookmarks and browsing them with a tag cloud, sharing them and creating groups with other users. In more sophisticated added values, notice the tags manipulation (splitting and merging) and watchlists, which are some kind of means to keep an eye on what other users bookmark.

On the side of the integration capabilities, you cannot say you don't have a choice. There are various importing and exporting features from or to the most widely used web browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, IE, Opera, Safari), as well as integration features with other services (Delicious and Google AdSense. For details on the the latter, cf. the post on their blog). Simpy also proposes several versions of toolbars and sidebars (for all supported browsers).

For the rest, go try. The registration takes about 3.5 seconds

The blogosphere is getting bigger every day. Services like Technorati are here to help us find what's these days popular among the bloggers. However, with the further evolution and growth of the blogging and the blogosphere, a need for a new, blog search engine emerged. Many have tried, but Sphere succeeded.

Unlike other blog search engines, Sphere doesn't put an exclusive emphasis on freshness, or a simplistic computation of "authority", or the inability to identify spam. Its advanced search algorithm delivers high-quality, relevant, and timely blog posts that match what user has been looking for.

Sphere's features at glance:

• An easy-to-use
• Great search results, with posts ordered by relevance or time
• Customizable time frames
• Related mainstream media, books, photos and podcasts right next to the results for a complete picture of the conversation
• Profiles and stats for each blog listed

Beside its search engine, Sphere also offers some interesting tools which will help you certainly help you in your daily endeavors in the blogosphere.

If I say DivX, what comes on your mind first? Whatever your answer may be, DivX, at present, is a digital media format. "At present" because the description of DivX has significantly changed since its apparition in 1998, following the development of the technology and the world of multimedia.

It started as a hacked version of the Microsoft MPEG-4 video codec, offering an alternative to the "official" implementation which, at the time, imposed restrictions regarding the media container format (it worked only wrapped up in asf files). In 2000, a company (DivX, Inc) was created to publish the first clean room version of the standard - DivX 4.0. Ever since, DivX has played an important role in our perception of the multimedia. With outstanding performances in compressing video streams, it opened the way to the wide popularization of digital video, side by side with the DVD. Even though this latter has not been conceived for exactly the same purposes, it seems to be today one of the main DivX's competitors.

So, what is happening today? It is happening that the latest versions of DivX (up from 6.0) have ceased to be merely a video codec, they are now a digital media format. Along with taking in account the video stream, DivX now has features like:

• Interactive video menus
• Multiple subtitles
• Multiple audio tracks
• Chapter points

It is more than evident that this move has for goal to bring on a higher level a concept that already works so well in reality - the DivX movies. They are intended to become more and more DVD-like and entirely contained in the new divx file format. Then, so long, avi? Probably not, however, as it seams that the divx wrapper is not more than an enhanced version of avi. Would it explain why, a year after it was released, the file format has some difficulties to impose on the market, the same one where the DivX video codec is already imposed and has so much success?

Several other things confirm that DivX, Inc. is taking its business very seriously, especially when exporting it towards the Web:

• the release of a web video player along with the version 6.0
• partnership with Google on Google Video
• the recent launch of Stage6, a DivX production of a YouTube-like site

Can you imagine your favourite online video store selling DivX copies instead of DVDs? Try to think about it, it may be about time

With the millions of websites on the Web today, finding a decent site which is not among the top 100 most-visited websites gets more complicated. Social bookmarking sites are here to help. In the previous posts, I've already ranted about del.icio.us and Furl, now it's time for a bit different service.

As with other social bookmarking sites, StumbleUpon also offers a free toolbar to install to your browser. However, unlike del.icio.us and Furl, StumbleUpon's sign-up process requires the installation of the toolbar.

StumbleUpon uses / ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers () have recommended. Unlike search engines or static directories, this enables a true "democracy of the web", as all their members have a say as to whether a page should be passed on. Rating pages also improves your stumbles… such ratings connect you to like-minded people who will show you interesting and relevant sites.

By getting only the pages people like, StumbleUpon can help you browse the Web more efficiently. In that sense, the installation of the its toolbar is not a hassle - it's an investment.

Here is something that at first looks nice but useless, from a purely practical point of view. But - wait 'till you see. Talking about Palary Browser.

So, the first thought is "why would someone need a browser entirely made in Ajax?". Of course, no doubt it makes more than a serious exercise and a great achievement for the Ajax community. Wanting to play critic, I tried to consider that's not enough, asked myself what's the use and went to see it more closely. So I got what I deserved - a simple and logical answer that even left me kind of ashamed. It's all there, and it's (almost) all justified.

According to the editor, the main use of such a feature is in easy circumventing all kinds of censorship or privacy related issues, by inserting an additional level in the communication between the client and the viewed web content. Your browser actually never talks to the site you are viewing (except, it seems, for the images), it's all done by Palary and is completely transparent for whoever/whatever is watching your connection. Might be handy (if you don't believe it, go spend some time in China or Iran).

The tricky part is that Palary doesn't support JavaScript. Might be handy sometimes too, but is mainly a factor that on the modern Web significantly limits the visible space. Palary is still in beta, and I wouldn't risk playing too critic with it again.

If you use Google Talk, you have maybe noticed that the image you are seeing these days in the top left corner of the application has changed somehow. Slightly, but it talks by itself. It's Google Talk's birthday.

One year (and two days, according to the Official Google Blog, but I think it should be a little bit more) ago, Google Talk saw the light of day for the first time. With the wind of Google's previous success at the back, it grew in importance quite quickly. Nevertheless, it managed to stay pretty close to the top during all this time, and that's surely not (only) because of the wind.

As it is the case with all the other Google services, the thing that strikes you at the very beginning is - simplicity. Visually far from being aggressive, stingy on colors and useless graphical elements, apparently with very little options and parameters (even though there are some, just as much as needed), Google Talk put the focus on what it's made for - talking. A simple, rather compact window, with a list of your contacts, their statuses and pictures. A click on a contact opens a window, in which you can type your text and see what the contact is typing (spot the organization of the text. Contact names at the beginning of line shown only when the speaker changes, timestamp inserted when the conversation lags…). Even easier for making a voice call (could hardly be more difficult). And that's about it.

You might say it's easy to put focus on talking, given that the functionality (transmitting text or voice) is easy to implement, and you have the point. So, what does Google Talk have that makes it stay high among it's concurrence? How about - the simplicity itself? Usability was always one of the Google's most taken care of features, and, among serious people, it can easily be understood. As an example of how Google Talk deals with their users' well-being, consider the smoothness of the recent addition of file transfer and voice mail capabilities. Another thing is the perfect integration with GMail, manifested in sharing contacts and conversations with the mail service and receiving notifications about new messages in the GMail inbox.

Happy birthday, Google Talk, and get out of beta soon.