The winners of the 2006 bloggies are up. The winner of weblog of the year was PostSecret, which I’d never heard of. After reading it for a bit I can see it is, quite frankly, brilliant and a deserving winner.
I’ve spent a good while adding some of the winners and nominees to Bloglines. Generally I subscribe to anything that looks vaguely interesting knowing that I can always junk it later, but I was surprised that a couple of sites didn’t have feeds of any sort. There could be many reasons, and I’m not going to try to second guess why they don’t but I do think it’s a shame. I love feeds, I tend to forget about things I’ve found as they get pushed further down the list, having them all in a feed reader means that I see things only when they’re updated which makes it much easier to manage everything.
Fortunately there are some tools to help with just this problem, I’m currently experimenting with FeedYes which promises to generate a useful feed out of any website. It’s seems to work although each post needs linked with meaningful text if you want something readable in the feed (other than fourteen entries that say ‘Link this article’.) Even for sites that don’t have useful text in the links it provides a placeholder in your feed reader and acts as a basic update notifier. Worth a look if you want to keep tabs on a feedless site.