Bloglines
In February, 2005, Ask announced that they had purchased Bloglines. This was Ask's initial foray into the world of blogs, and for those of you who have not yet tried Bloglines, I highly recommend it. Once you start using it, you'll soon understand the benefits. It enables you to subscribe to as many blog feeds as you want, and at a glance see which of them have posted new information. Instead of regularly visiting all of the various blogs that you're interested in, you can simply check Bloglines to view the new posts. In essence, it's a tool that helps you gather information more efficiently and saves you time. As an alternative, you might try using Google's similar tool called Google Reader.

RSS Smart Answers
If you are not a user of Bloglines, but wish to quickly check for recent blog posts, you can now simply search for the name of the blog on Ask's search engine. For example, if you search Ask.com for the term "searchenginewatch", you'll find Search Engine Watch's most recent blog entries at the top of the search results. If the search term does not match a specific blog, then the results might display the "latest news" from various sources. For example, a search for search engine optimization does not display any specific blog posts, but it does show some of the latest news related to SEO from a few sources. To date, Ask is only displaying information from a limited number of blogs that were chosen from the most popular feeds subscribed to by users of Bloglines. Ask is regularly expanding the list of supported blogs, so we should see results appear for a greater selection of search terms in the future. In a more recent update, Ask announced that the RSS Smartanswers feature was going to be made available on the international Ask.com sites as well.

Blogs & Feeds Search
Ask.com introduced their Blogs & Feeds Search back in June of this year. The Ask blog search engine is an excellent fusion of Ask.com's search expertise and Bloglines' exspansive collection of blogosphere data. As the engine name suggests, the results for any search consist only of blogs and feeds. The results can be sorted by relevance, popularity, and how recent a feed was located. There are several nice features integrated into the Blogs & Feeds engine, including a roll-over preview of each result, and buttons for subscribing to the feed, or posting it to your preferred social bookmarking site.

Conclusion
Blogs have become a very prominent aspect of the web, and an important source of news and information for many people around the world. Ask.com has recognized this trend and embraced it with several blog friendly features. Whether you're a veteran blogger, or new to the blogosphere, you'll find some useful tools at Ask.com.

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