EXCLUSIVES

News Aggregators? > Check the Doe Report
By Chris Mace

July 2004

The Drudge Report, Matt Drudge's popular web daily, syndicates dozens of publications, columnists, and blogs, effectively comprising an updated table of contents for news and opinion reflecting his tastes. The popularity of that site also goes to explain the popularity of newsreaders, applications that effectively allow any John Doe to create his own personalized Doe Report.

Newsreaders, also known as news aggregators, are applications that grab content from websites and blogs like Gawker, which has a single main page on which short items are continually posted in succession.

News feeds from these sites are designated as RSS, or "rich site summary," which indicates micro-content such as news, sports scores, images, and blog entries. To subscribe to a feed, copy its URL and paste it into the aggregator.

Typically, a user subscribes to feeds while reading online and the list quickly grows, with each addition bringing the collector the thrill and promise of making the Doe Report even more fair and balanced. Fairness aside, the news feeds people choose, like the kinds of sites others link to on their blogs or websites are as telling as an iPod's™ contents.

Bigger websites such as Wired News and BBC News Online have begun to set up feeds. Sites that don't offer them are typically banished to a browser's bookmarks bar, and using a reader to follow news amounts to discovering a new way to freebase info-crack.
An aggregator also is a good way to stay up on industry-related news, less frequented sites and publications. It's less distracting and time consuming than checking individual sites, and advertisers have not yet managed to pollute news feeds with spam, although it's entirely possible to find what amounts to a spam feed.

Aggregators such as NewzCrawler and Amphetadesk are available for most platforms. A selection of them, including some that do not have to be downloaded and can be used online, can be found at: www.blogspace.com/rss/readers

For OS X, NetNewsWire, which features an Aqua GUI and a range of options, is excellent. Like some other aggregators, it resembles an Outlook® or Mail inbox, but with feeds instead of messages.

Clicking on a feed opens a list of headlines or descriptions in another window, and each one can be partially opened to reveal a hyperlinked article, summary, image, or blog entry. In this way it's possible to toggle through hundreds of headlines in a matter of minutes.

"All it takes to manage information overload is the right interface," says Brent Simmons, who designed NetNewswire. "The 'knowledge economy' is a cliché, but it's a fact. There's more and more information and more and more need to keep up."

Simmons hopes that NetnewsWire will make it easier to keep up with info, but that doing so remains enjoyable because he says the worst thing would be to "drown joylessly in a sea of information."

For certain kinds of content news aggregators easily rival web browsers and email. Businesses have begun to set up their own in-house RSS feeds to keep employees abreast of vital developments. For example, Rachero Software, Simmon's company, has a number of corporate clients.

Simmons, who wrote NetNewsWire party because it was a convenient project with which to teach himself Cocoa, noted that there are other information management tools, as well. There are "apps like Tinderbox [for developers], and VoodooPad [a hyperlinking tool], various outliners, these are all important. I don't know what it's all going to look like in five years, but right now there's an incredible amount of experimentation going on and a lot of overlap between different kinds of apps. I don't really think in terms of generations, I think of an interesting, useful and energizing chaos."

There are new ways to use the web without threatening browsers, said Simmons, such as iTunes®, which combines HTML rendering with specialized features. But there also are new ways to use aggregators themselves. Simmons brought up Read It To Me: which allows users to convert RSS to MP3s and listen to them on personal devices such as the iPod.

The "blogosphere" is providing an interesting viral model for the way information spreads, and is driving the way certain groups form and interact online. Almost all blogs offer RSS because of the way they are set up, and as blogs proliferate and even supplant other forms of media, news aggregators are an ideal way to track them.

They also mediate the Internet experience while remaining a far cry from AOL-style Internet portals-many of which seem to be little more than multimedia coupons or the browser equivalent of Wal-Mart.

Where blogs give everyone a shot at being a pundit, news aggregators make it perfectly simple to set up the Doe Report right on there on the desktop, and there's never been so much to syndicate.

www.rancherosoftware.com
www.blogspace.com/rss/readers