The Way of the Aggregator
I’ll third Sebastian’s seconding of Oliver’s comments on Dave Winer’s theory on news aggregators. Dave said:
RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.
In reality, a news aggregator should do both. I don’t want my RSS feeds all filtered into separate little folders, but like Oliver, I’m subscribed to a whopping number of feeds — 77 to be exact! And I just started using a news aggregator last week! My only previous experience had been Radio; I’m now a big RSS convert thanks to SharpReader.
SharpReader allows me to collect them into categories, in a Windows Explorer style set of folders. I can click on a folder and read a reverse-chronological list of all the feeds in the sub-folders (or chronological or sort by title or by weblog & category). I can even click on the top-level folder and read all of the subscribed feeds in reverse chronological order, a la Radio Userland’s only option for organizing feeds, or a variety of other orders. If I just want to see what, say, D’Arcy is up to, then I can peek at just that weblog’s folder. Much more flexible!
Whoah… That’s kinda scary. Stop spying on me! ;-)
NetNewsWire also handles feeds this way. You can view aggregate lists of posts in any “folder”, individual feeds, or an aggregate of all subscriptions. Very cool. Oh, and it’s searchable, too…
…and only available for MacOS. :-/
(SharpReader is searchable, too, by the way.)
But only being available for MacOS ist a good thing ;-)
It’s funny, as I used (and still use) newsreaders for many years, but still prefer the aggregator in the Radio way (that’s why I implemented it in that way in PyDS).
My objections against client newsaggregators are much the same as Gregs arguments against client blogging tools, though: I like to read my news from everywhere I am :-)
Another solution: NetGator, for Windows (http://www.newsgator.com)aggregrates feeds directly into Outlook mailboxes. It can aggregate some or all feeds into a single folder (for example, I send all my tech-related “RSS news” feeds into a collective folder) or can separate messages according to source (for example, I collect RSS streams from a variety of queries for MLX, CAREO,Humbul, and GoogleNews and each query goes into its own folder).
The messages can then *additionally* be organized and searched in all the ways that Outlook supports. This includes native Outlook functionality, plus the functionality supported by the extensive library of Outlook add-ons. My favorite of these is the *wonderful* Outlook database program, NEO: Nelson Email Organizer (http://www.caelo.com/).
As far as remote access goes, there are commercial Outlook-specific tools that allow you to access messages stores from any browser or web-enabled PDAs or Cell Phones — see, for example, LoudPC (www.loudpc.com). There are also excellent open source generic remote access products that will work with Outlook, NEO, or any other app (e.g., TightVNC — http://www.tightvnc.com).
So, there are a number of ways to get the functionality described in this discussion. For those PC users who also use Outlook, NewsGator + the NEO Outlook add-on is an excellent option to consider.
Yes, Georg, I would also prefer a web-based news aggregator, although I haven’t found one that provides as much functionality as a client-side app. Not true of web-based weblogging tools, IMHO.
Yet another!
First time I’ve heard of it, but SharpReader looks like an interesting personal news aggregator.