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Seems a recent rage on the net has been RSS feeds. Most blogs and news sites are now providing them. It allows you to integrate/aggregate various sites without having to go visit them. It's sort of a newer version of the old Pointcast push content from the late 90's - tell me when there's something I'm interested in vs make me go and look. I've been aware of it for a while but just never spend a lot of time trying to do anything with the technology. Well someone IMed me last night with a link to the new http://my.yahoo.com which allows you to aggregate RSS feeds. I played with it a bit, but I didn't want to go and change my home page yet. I started looking around for other programs/solutions and looked at programs such as Pluck which integrates pretty heavily into IE, a couple stand alone apps like Sharpreader and then a program which integrates into Outlook called Newsgator. What I like about Newsgator is I'm always in Outlook (home or work) so I don't need to have another program running that I need to flop back and forth to. It integrates nicely and there's no new interface I need to learn since it's like content coming into Outlook like an email comes in and then moved to the specific feed folder. Now granted, I've only been playing with it for a day, and a week or two will tell if the thrill lasts, but so far I like it. It's not free, but not expensive. The only issue I've run into so far is that it doesn't like an Auto Config proxy so I need to switch the proxy settings as I move my notebook between work and home. Some of the feeds I have are Broadband Reports home page, a couple blogs of friends/family (which is great since it pulls the content and I don't have to visit each site to see what (or if anything at all) is new, SlickDeals.net which is a deal site that I now get the deals pushed to me, The New York Times Technology news, ZDNet News, etc. I'll look to see what other feeds I find that are interesting, and I'm sure I'll add a lot and then delete the ones that don't seem to provide any real value or have duplicate content I'm getting from other feeds. I don't think this fad will fade quickly. It has been integrated into Firefox's latest version of the browser and I'd imagine will continue to pick up steam, especially if it proves to be a productivity game vs having to go and visit sites each day (or multiple times per day). |