Since January, I have been using Rojo as my primary online newsreader. Most of the experience has been good but there have been some niggles: in particular, some feeds don’t seem to be picked up reliably. My blogroll is up to about 100 feeds and I’m not bothered about whether or not I see every story on most of them. However, there are a few cases – for example, friends who live at a distance – where I want to see every posting and where the Rojo service has been somewhat “hit or miss” (it might be an issue with Blogger feeds – certainly all my Blosxom work has appeared reliably).

Since I was working on my blogroll yesterday, using a widget provided by Bloglines, I decided to give that service another try. So far, the experience has been very positive; it looks very similar to six months ago (easy orientation) but seems fast, responsive and reliable. I think I might stick with it, at least for now.

One good thing to be said for both services is that they allow importing and exporting of your list of feeds via OPML. That meant it was relatively straightforward to extract my current reading list from Rojo and bring the Bloglines account up to date. I’m very grateful that both services subscribe to the “Web 2.0” philosophy of allowing the user to own their data. Yesterday, I was using it to move my attention away from Rojo but that’s also how it got me in the first place and, if their service seems to have improved in a few months time, provides an easy route for me to go back.

Anyway, back to Bloglines for now… I wonder if Google Reader has improved at all?