Using Feed Readers to Aggregate Online Content

Once you find an online news site you like, how do you keep up to date with that site's content? Personally, I tend to use a process that goes something like this:

1. Type in the address (with autocomplete) to get back to the site.

2. Bookmark the site once I find myself going back regularly.

3. Subscribe to the site in order to bring the content to me rather than checking in for new content.

Step #3 involves using a feed reader that pulls content from multiple websites into a dashboard or custom news site. One common example of a feed reader is a My.Yahoo page where users can customize which headlines, stock quotes and weather reports they'll see. Yahoo aggregates those headlines from multiple sources creating a custom page. While My.Yahoo works well, I prefer using Bloglines because it's much more powerful. Bloglines tracks and stores all new headlines and stories from sites I find interesting so the content is there for me when I have time to read it. Basically, it's a TiVo for online news.

What is the best feed reader?

That's a tough question to answer. Bloglines works well for how I read online news sources. Google Reader's interface makes no sense to me. Both of those services are web-based, but there are some good client-based programs as well, such as NewsGator. Another option is FeedBlitz, which delivers the latest stories or headlines to you via e-mail. The best feed reader is the one that provides the most intuitive layout for how you like to read news. Try setting up a handful of feeds on a few popular feed readers to find out which works best for you.

Here is a breakdown of the most popular feed readers used to subscribe to Technology Evangelist:

A few feed readers that fall under "Other" include My.Yahoo, Rojo and Thunderbird.

For those of you currently subscribing to our Feedblitz e-mail subscription, if you haven't tried a feed reader like Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader or Rojo, I strongly recommend giving one of those services a try. The true feed readers have higher deliverability so you won't miss any posts due to spam filters. And you'll be able to keep your e-mail inbox one e-mail a day cleaner than it is today.

Which feed reader do you prefer and why? How do you explain feed readers to people who haven't used them before?

That sounds similar to my experience with Google Reader. Gmail is different than most email applications, but still made sense to me. Google Reader did not.

RSS reader applications are really in their infancy, so I think we'll see a LOT of new enhancements, including adoption of new ways to label and sort content in the very short future.

Interesting tool you've greated there, citeblogger. That does seem like an easy way to generate a custom news site.

I use SharpReader. This was the very first I applied and have never had any use for anything else. It simply does what it says it will do and it's free.

Comments

1. Posted by: Peter on March 30, 2006 9:37 AM:

I was an early fan of Google Reader but I've now returned to Bloglines. One thing I liked about G. Reader was a seemingly random listing of individual posts from my feeds that it listed on the left side of the screen. You could sort by relevance or date (now they have 'auto' or 'date'). But if you do the auto sort you get posts of interest that you might not otherwise see (if you subscribe to a lot of feeds with no time to ever read them all). I guess I could just troll del.icio.us for a similar experience.

I also like G. Reader's labelling. I wish Bloglines would allow tagging (both feeds and posts) so I could easily group posts for retrieval.

G. Reader recently added some sharing features.

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