Second, an RSS reader must provide knowledge management tools to help you prioritize and categorize entries so that information can be put away and found again. This can be as simple as marking an entry "Keep New" so it doesn't disappear from the feed, as Bloglines does it, or the much more complex and useful tagging features of Google Reader.
And finally, an RSS reader should support collaboration by giving you a variety of ways to communicate both the information in the entries and the metadata: the blogroll (the list of subscribed feeds), the original URLs of the source entries, any categories and tags you apply, and comments.
These are the standards by which all RSS readers must be judged. I took a look to see how these three Web readers measured up.
Bloglines
Is Bloglines an RSS reader with features especially tailored to publishing a blog, or an online blogging tool that's particularly strong on RSS features? Either way it's one of the older Web-based readers, having been launched in 2003 and bought by Ask.com in 2005.
 
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Bloglines builds on its RSS reader functions by allowing you to publish a blog from within the application. Its blog-creation tools give a whole new meaning to "basic:" it lacks almost every control over presentation and formatting of your blog entry. But it includes a number of nice features for creating a blog entry from an item in an RSS feed: You can publish a blog item directly from the feed entry, or add it to a workspace labeled "Clippings" and work on it there before you add it to the blog.
Adding a subscription is easy. Bloglines can locate RSS feed URLs in Web pages and offer a selection of what it finds. You can also import an OPML file to set up your subscriptions, and add a subscription bookmarklet to your browser toolbar.
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