Someone had a question this week about switching feed readers, and since others might have similar questions, I thought I’d talk about it here. I also wanted to share this recent comparison of Google Reader and Bloglines which might help you decide which is the best fit for you.

If you’ve been trying out a particular feed reader and you’ve decided to switch to another, you can change the preferences in Firefox to default to your preferred reader when you click to subscribe. Go to to the Tools Menu > Options > Feeds. There you can select a default reader.

If you’ve collected a sizable number of feeds, you may not want to subscribe to them all again in the new reader. Most readers will allow you to export your feeds as an OPML file then import that file into the new reader. It might be slightly more complicated if you’re going from Bloglines to something else, because in Part 2 of the course I directed you to use the beta version of Bloglines which has a much-improved interface. However, since it’s still in development, they have not yet added the export feature. You can get around this by logging into the old interface here: http://www.bloglines.com with your username and password. Once in, click on the Feeds tab and scroll down to Additional Feature > Export Subscriptions. Save the export file to your desktop.

Then log into Google Reader (I’m assuming you’ve already set up your account.) Check here for instructions on importing the feeds. Other readers will follow a similar import process.