Another way to keep up with blogs

The raging battle between Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft is making life great for us. Witness Google Earth vs. Microsoft Earth, Google Mail versus the new Yahoo Mail, and now My Google versus My Microsoft.

My Yahoo is the current king of personalized start pages due to the vast amounts of content you can aggregate onto your home page. But it's a pain to manage all that content: in other words, it's a bit tedious to find, add, and organize the layout of your page.

But both Microsoft and Google are using new Web technology called AJAX to make it much easier to change the look and feel of your home page (with drag and drop, pop up frames, sidebars, and other user interace tricks). Give them a whirl:

• My Google
• Microsoft Start (yes, it's a Microsoft thing, though you'd think they were trying to hide that fact!)
  

Both Google and Microsoft are also making it much easier to add RSS feeds (read: blog postings) to your personalized page. Here's a screen shot of the Start page with a couple of familiar blogs on it.



You can do the same thing with Google too, though I've run into a few technical problems where it claims that the feeds are temporarily unavailable. I don't think it's quite a convenient as blog postings showing up like email, but it has its own merits.

On the one hand, these sites are just easy ways of choosing and organizing the stuff we want to see. On the other hand, I actually think we are looking at the beginning of the end for traditional newspapers (and maybe printed magazines as well). The days of professional editors choosing our content for us are numbered, replaced by us choosing our own content sources.