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Special Delivery News aggregators bring custom-ordered information to your computer. By Jeffrey Beard Jun/Jul '04 Issue |
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Say you have a list of 50 Web sites and blogs you would like to read each week. This might require you to visit each one in your Web browser and wait for it to load — graphics, ads, animation and all. Even over a broadband connection, it could take a lot of time for you to get to the content. Others have tried Web site capture programs that “grab” pages and download them for later reading. The downside to this approach is it also collects all of the fat, when what you are looking for is the lean content itself. As do many professionals, I suffer from Web-information overload. It comes at me from all angles: e-mail messages, attachments, Web sites, blogs, forums, Usenet groups and more. I have only a limited amount of time to spend visiting these sources, therefore I need a good tool to help me assimilate, manage and post information I find interesting and useful.
Thus enters a new category of software, news
aggregators or RSS readers, which collect and pull in news items, blog
posts, Web site updates and other types of information on a frequent basis.
Aggregators pull content — usually text, basic formatting and hyperlinks —
into a single window and organize it into groups or folders. They make Web
reading similar to reading e-mail, and many aggregators have an
Outlook-style display showing news sources in the far left pane, a list of
individual headlines on the top right and contents in the bottom right. |
Program Information NewzCrawler 1.7 FeedDemon 1.10
« NewsGator 2.0 « Shootout Winner |
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How do you get all that Web information into
an aggregator? The key is an RSS news feed. RSS has been referred to as
Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary. RSS news
feeds are available for free on many mainstream Web sites, particularly news
sites, and blogs of all kinds. All most people need to know is RSS feeds are
specially-formatted eXtensible Markup Language pages and commonly appear on
sites as small orange or blue buttons with the letters “XML” or “RSS.” They
might also be hyperlinked text labeled “Syndicate this site.” To pull this
information into an aggregator, copy the underlying Web address into the
aggregator, and it does the rest. News is delivered to you as if it were
e-mail. Bloggers generally love news aggregators because they offer the ability to quickly scan and search new information from hundreds of sources, which in turn lets bloggers quickly and easily post new content. For this Shootout, I compared three of the most popular news aggregators available: NewzCrawler, FeedDemon and NewsGator.
NewzCrawler Other strengths include auto-RSS feed discovery, which pops up in a window listing all available feeds on the Web page you are viewing. If you want to add feeds manually you can do so with dialogs that prompt you through the entire process. The browser pane supports both the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Gecko browser engines, a rare feature in aggregators. It also features a handy toolbar button to hide the other two panes and maximize the browser pane for easy reading. Other nice features include support of a wide variety of RSS feeds, and the ability to fetch and post to Usenet groups and add traditional Web sites to the “Channel Tree,” even if they lack a news feed. Bloggers whose systems support the Blogger API can post news items directly to their blogs from NewzCrawler. To transfer your list of feeds between computers or Web-based aggregators, and to perform backups, NewzCrawler lets you export your information to three types of files: a .NCW NewzCrawler-specific backup file, an Open Content Syndication Directory file and an Outline Processor Markup Language file. As good and fully featured as NewzCrawler is, several things could be improved. The bottom right pane only displayed one Web site or news summary at a time, even after I chose the Mozilla Gecko engine and restarted the program. One of the advantages of Mozilla is it allows you to open many browser pages within a single browser program window. There is an option buried deep in the NewzCrawler preferences screen that allows you to open multiple browser windows with a double-click, but they end up cluttering the screen and task bar. To me, a news aggregator should streamline the newsgathering process. While using NewzCrawler’s single-page browsing, anytime I clicked on a link to read more content and then followed other embedded links, I would visually lose my breadcrumb trail. Naturally the “Back” button works, but once you are accustomed to tabbed browsing it’s something you really miss. Also, it was not the fastest aggregator in the Shootout.
FeedDemon Usability is high with FeedDemon. As in most other programs, you can resize a pane with drag-and-drop borders or a “maximize browser” button. FeedDemon also displays two thin buttons within the pane dividers, one for the channel list and one for the browser pane. Clicking on either button hides the pane, while clicking again restores it. This lets you see more of the information you want and saved me a fair amount of time. I found myself more focused on reading the actual content than on fighting with the interface. Feature-wise, FeedDemon shares much in common with NewzCrawler, although there are some differences. Like NewzCrawler, FeedDemon lets you control the frequency of updates, auto-purge expired content, perform searches through the content, sort news items by clicking on column headers and mark items with flags. FeedDemon is aptly named as it’s the fastest of the aggregators I tested. RSS feed updates went very quickly, and the program felt snappy regardless of the task. FeedDemon shines at managing your information with three key functions. First, you can set up multiple “Watches,” which search incoming news items. When a channel you subscribe to is updated, the Watch collects items containing your keywords and puts them in a folder. Think of a Watch as your personal news clipping service. Another nice feature: When you first set up a Watch, FeedDemon prompts you to search against already downloaded news items instead of waiting for the next update. For example, I set up a simple Watch that searched for “Microsoft” and displayed all mentions of the company from all of my channels in a single listing. Next, you can have multiple “News Bins,” to store items. If you want to keep a particular blog post or news item, right click on it to save it in a News Bin. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as a Web site capture tool — it only copies the information in the feed for that story or post. Another great feature is FeedDemon’s “Search Channel,” which uses an online RSS search service to find individual news items matching a keyword or phrase. This integrated service is fantastic because it allows you to search for information outside your subscriptions. The results can lead you to other feeds of interest, and bloggers can see who has mentioned their names, sites or content. With Watches, News Bins and Search Channels, FeedDemon raises the bar and provides enhanced and highly convenient tools for finding, filing and retrieving information. While FeedDemon doesn’t include its own blog editor, it addresses the need by integrating with other blog editors installed on your PC, such as w.Bloggar and Zempt. This lets you choose the best editor for your needs. As for limitations, FeedDemon isn’t perfect. It doesn’t include hierarchical (expandable/collapsible) Outlook-style folders, although this is being considered for a future version. For now you must select groups from a pull-down menu, such as News, Technology, Sports or Blogs. Each group of feeds is displayed in a flat list in the left pane, and you can customize their names. FeedDemon requires Internet Explorer 6 to take advantage of all its features. It lacks some of the export file formats of NewzCrawler, but does support the OPML format, which is the most important XML-based format for exporting and importing your list of channels to other aggregators. In addition, you can’t add a traditional Web site to a FeedDemon channel — it only supports news feeds. Nor does FeedDemon support reading or posting to Usenet groups, which is strange given all of FeedDemon’s online support forums are Usenet newsgroups. Last, it lacks built-in help screens and its online documentation is spotty. However, it features a helpful setup wizard to get you up and running quickly.
NewsGator That said, NewsGator takes on many of the same advantages and disadvantages of the Outlook platform. You don’t have to jump between separate programs to read e-mail and news updates, and forwarding items is seamless. You gain the power and convenience of Outlook’s hierarchical folders and the ability to customize your Outlook views to take advantage of NewsGator. Perhaps one of NewsGator’s most compelling and unique features is it doesn’t limit you to checking news items from a single computer. Other programs require you to export and import your feed lists between computers or online aggregrators, which becomes cumbersome when traveling or switching between work and home. To overcome this, NewsGator offers a separate online subscription service starting at $5.95 per month, which synchronizes your news feeds between multiple computers and its Web-based aggregator. Thus you can access your news feeds from nearly any location with an Internet connection and a Web browser. NewsGator Online offers Web, e-mail and Mobile editions, which extend this “wherever” convenience to personal digital assistants and smartphones. Clearly, NewsGator is targeting the busy mobile professional. NewsGator does let you read Usenet newsgroup posts, and adds a “Subscribe in NewsGator” context menu to Internet Explorer. NewsGator also offers a powerful “Search for Feeds” wizard. Without NewsGator’s optional online service, you can search for RSS/Atom feeds and Usenet newgroups. The optional pay-for service provides two more integrated searches: A keyword search and a URL search that returns content related to the address you provide. Regarding downsides, NewsGator seemed a bit more clunky than NewzCrawler and FeedDemon. This could be because it’s based on Outlook and the .NET Framework platforms, but dial-up users beware: It was definitely the slowest of the three to download and update feeds. Since NewsGator runs within Outlook, it doesn’t feature an integrated browser view. Instead, one needs to shuffle back and forth between Outlook and another Web browser when clicking on hyperlinks in news items. You get seamless e-mail integration, but you lose some convenience on the Web side.
Approaching the
Finish Line Overall, NewzCrawler is a very good program. It’s easy to use and has an array of features that will satisfy the needs of many users. I found FeedDemon to be an incredible piece of software, despite the 1.x version number. If the missing features I described are not critical for you, FeedDemon more than makes up for those shortcomings with powerful data mining and collection tools. It’s fast and its user interface is first rate. NewsGator is a great tool for Outlook fans. Many of its features, especially organizational and search features, are dependent on Outlook’s capabilities. If you can do something in Outlook and like how it works, odds are you will have a similar experience with NewsGator. Its optional online services are handy for mobile users, but since I have hundreds of news feeds, its slowness in updating them knocked it out of the running for me.
And the Winner Is
...
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR JEFFREY BEARD is an attorney and legal technology consultant in Milwaukee. He is an author and a frequent presenter on legal technology and practice management topics, and also designed and operates the highly acclaimed Web site, www.lawtechguru.com. |
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