I’ve been using Kinja on and off for the last few weeks, ever since I made a Kinja digest for both Hooblogs (see here) and Sloanblogs (see here). The digests were an afterthought, inspired by the press that Kinja was getting, but now (to my surprise) they’re the most useful features of both lists.
What’s cool about Kinja is that it’s lightweight, loads quickly, provides an attractive UI, is intelligent about providing excerpts of the item descriptions, and provides a “read anywhere” view of your set of sites. Radio, which was the first aggregator I ever used, provided an attractive UI but wasn’t especially lightweight (particularly in its Mac OS 9 incarnation) and provided full descriptions of the items in each feed. It’s funny how much I like the abridged description feature, in fact, since my own feed provides full text descriptions and since I normally hate having to click through to get the full story. But Kinja’s apparently simple algorithm of grabbing the first two or three sentences of the description if it’s above a pre-set length is remarkably effective. It’s also made me more conscious about not burying the lead of my posts; in short, it’s improved my writing.