Celebrity scandals and the trouble with Bloglines

Now, I was planning to write the post on media's celebrity obsession last week, and gleefully report towards the end that getting minimal exposure to celebrity news is easier than ever in world where you can slice and dice content as you see fit with RSS and newsreaders.

Why bother with the news that annoy you, when you can choose to subscribe only to your favourite feeds or keywords within feeds?

However, life and work intervened, and this week I'm not quite so gleeful. I've been using Bloglines for a long time, but its performance keeps getting worse and worse.

One of the charms of using a newsreader is how it's supposed to show updates the minute a site has been updated. This function has been painfully slow in Bloglines recently, so slow that one Bloglines user wrote:

"I've gotten so desperate for updates that I've been surfing over to the INDIVIDUAL WEB SITES. Help!"

The problem has been exacerbated by several of my feeds, including my standing Technorati searches, only showing up "Internal Server Error" during the last few days, which has made me realise how much I've come to rely on my newsreader.

To loose the massive archive of posts I've built up over time in Bloglines feels almost like the nightmare scenario of suffering a laptop crash only to realise you've forgotten to back up your files.

But, even though the prospect of switching newsreaders seem daunting, got to find a way of saving my Bloglines archive, the service has been so unreliable recently - unread feeds disappearing, slow to update etc - that I realise it would make life much easier if I did.

I've been looking at ZapTXT as it's supposed to guarantee instant updates -  I've come to rely more and more on my newsreader also for work and for tracking stories - but would be grateful for any advice...