Bloglines and Booker problems

Is anyone else having long-running problems with Bloglines Beta? RSS feeds from, among many others, the Guardian Book page and blog, Nigel Beale's Nota Bene, RSB's comments and The Chagall Position - which had posted at the weekend an insightful post on the Handke-Effekt - are failing to come through. Not only that, its forum is clogged with spam and it's deleted the very-useful subscriber figures. What's going on?

But hold on, please don't suggest Google Reader. I can't stand Google Reader. Google Reader is over-designed, unintuitive and impossible to use. Has Medialens' web designer been poached? As one scrolls through posts, it leaps forward for no good reason and one loses any sense of place. A perfect design for super-user information junkies perhaps but not readers.

Unfortunately no feed aggregator can weed out blogs that feel the need to tell the world: "And the winner is ... The White Tiger." A blogger's mantra should be Add Value. For example: Booklit responds to the depressing news with a winning demolition of this year's judging panel, The Literary Saloon is dismayed and even the generous, open-minded John Self was moved to say this year's winner is

"a forgettable debut for which the most striking question is not, How on earth did it get onto the Booker longlist, but How did it get published in the first place?".

Time to retreat to one's Book Igloo (via).