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I like Bloglines. It’s taken over from Feeddemon, Newzcrawler, Newsmonster, and all the other RSS readers that I’ve tried.
But as it’s an external web service, I can’t use it with internal, non-public, RSS feeds here at work, and the value of evangelising it inside our firewall is vastly reduced. This is annoying, and I can’t think of an easy and elegant solution short of reinventing bloglines – which isn’t really elegant, and not that easy.
For now, I’m back to using my copy of Feeddemon, which at least has the advantage of synchronising with Bloglines so when I go home I don’t have to wade through masses of already read posts. But this is not ideal.
Would a Bloglines equivalent of Google Desktop Search help here ? GDS indexes documents on local storage, yet integrates the results when you do a search on www.google.com. Would one then want a feature that allowed this local store to pipe into a private Bloglines feed to allow reading from outside the firewall ?
I’m a little concerned that, except for specific tasks, Bloglines is the web for me.
I was thinking about this problem, too. One reasonably secure, though clunky, might be to write a rss-to-email tool that forwards entries from the internal rss feeds to a private bloglines email address. Basically, you need bloglines to support a push model where you can upload an updated rss feed to your bloglines account. Won't scale nearly as nicely as there primary model, but I think it would work...
I guess you could replicate the same system without needing to change bloglines:
push your internal RSS to some private space that's outside the firewall and then just subscribe as a regular feed (you'd probably still want to authenticate using username password embedded in the URL, and make the subscription private)
if you establish a private username/password that can be distributed to those who need it, then you've sort of got a scaleable solution.
I'm not so worried about security in this instance - more about being able to use bloglines as a reader.
In any case, if there really was some security concerns, then I'd stay well away from bloglines as a reader - I'd be much more likely to use a traditional client (feeddeemon or onfolio or something like that).
NewsGator is about to introduce just such a product in NewsGator Enterprise Edition. Its engine is the same one that powers NewsGator Online, the company's Bloglines competitor. It sits inside the corporate firewall so users can read both internal and external feeds. It sports a clean web UI, and also features integration with Microsoft Exchange for feed delivery through any Exchange client, including Outlook, Entourage, Outlook Web Access, Pocket Outlook, etc.