I thought I’d finally give some news aggregator software a try. After trying a few I settled on Aggie, at least for a while.
What’s a news aggregator? Basically it’s this software that goes out and reads websites for you and then tells you if they changed. Instead of you visiting 10 to 50 websites a day only to find that they have added nothing new you can run this software and it will give you a list of each site that has added somthing new and it gives you the first couple of sentences or so of each article and a link so you can read the whole thing if the blurb caught your interest.
Unforunately, currently it seems like almost every news aggregator has some feature missing. For example most news aggregators use this standard called RSS. RSS is a way for a website to list it’s newest articles so that a program like a news aggregator can easily figure it all out. Without RSS a news aggregator would think a website changed every time a banner ad changed or a comment count etc. But, that’s exactly one of the features missing on many news aggregators. Because some sites don’t have or support RSS yet most news aggregators can’t handle those sites. For example most blogs running on blogger basic (vs blogger pro) do not support RSS.
Another problem is with thousands of sites out there many put out broken RSS. Most news aggregators can’t handle that. I suppose there’s really not much to be done about that. If the site’s RSS file is broken the computer can’t easily make sense of it.
I wonder though, will this news aggregator be a good thing or bad? The plus is I don’t waste any time going to a site at which nothing has changed. For example many of my friends update their blog once a week or once a month. Particularly my family have blogs that it seems currently unlikely they will update often so instead of checking each day I can just forget about them and the news aggregator will tell me when they have updated something.
But, on the other hand, now I have just one button I can click and it can check 10 to 50 sites for me almost instantly and give me constant distractions. :-S Hopefully I can resist the temptation to click the button to check them all except once or twice a day or so. 
What’s missing for me in a news aggregator is the look and feel of the site. The site design is part of the experience. I’m not only looking for “content” in the form of pure writing — I also enjoy checking out sites because of say, your changing greggman header graphic, or the little icons next to each post. You don’t get the whole experience from a news aggregator.
If all you use the aggregator for is to notify you there is something new then you don’t miss the design since you’ll go to the site anyway. For example, I got tired of checking my sister, mom and nephew’s sites because they only update them once in a blue moon. Now I don’t have to check, the aggregator will do it for me telling me there is something new
Also, depending on the site, some sites send out entire articles, some just excerpts. http://Joelonsoftware.com sends out the entire article, most other sites just excerpts, so I generally just use the aggregator to tell me if the site has anything new and if it sounds interesting enough to go look at. If so then I go to that site.
Feedreader handles all types of different feeds, including RSS, RDF and XML without problem, and also shows the full website linked to the feeds in its own browser pane. Take a look: You can download it from :
http://www.allwirelessmedia.com/feedreader/ click on Feedreader link below Parent Directory link to download.
I stopped using Aggie. Currently I’m using Oddpost which is a pay for webbased e-mail client that happens to also support newsfeeds. They appear in an MS Outlook like interface as folders just like e-mail. You can select articles and delete them, just like old mail, and the ones you haven’t read yet appear in bold. I suspect MS will add this feature to Outlook at some point.