Via BoingBoing, I just found out that Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2004 was “Blog”. Personally, “defenestration” (which came it at number 10) has been one of my favorite words for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was honestly thrilled to find out that words like that actually existed. And back in those days, the word “blog” did *not* yet exist, so it wasn’t even in the running.

Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to write about Bloglines for quite a while. It’s basically a free, web-based news aggregator. It’s also a blog search engine, and it lets you create and share blogs of your own. There are a couple of nifty Bloglines extensions for Firefox, too. While there are many services like this, it seems that as of today, Bloglines is the clear leader in this space. The only thing that worries is me is that I *don’t* see any ads on their site, which makes me wonder if/how they make any money. I generally prefer to keep this sort of thing on my own machine(s), rather than using a web-based service (even a free one), but for people who are often away from their own machine(s) or who are daunted by installing and setting up a news aggregator, this seems like a killer web app. If you want to subscribe to this blog via Bloglines, just click on the “Sub Bloglines” button below:

If you end up trying Bloglines (or if you’re already a user), drop a comment and let me know if/how you like it.