Feed Aggregators: Which Do you Use?

[Chris Sherman]

If you spend any time in the blogosphere you most likely have found that feed aggregators are indispensable tools for monitoring your favorite blogs. These tools allow you to subscribe to RSS, Atom or other feeds that are automatically updated by your feed aggregator whenever new content is published.

Today's SearchDay article, Managing the Firehose of Real-Time Information, takes a look at PubSub, a service that allows you to monitor the blogosphere, SEC filings, Newsgroup postings and other sources of frequently changing information by creating keyword-based queries. Whenever something new gets published, PubSub updates your subscriptions, providing you with a different view than you get by just subscribing to individual feeds.

PubSub offers a Sidebar to monitor subscriptions, but most people will still want to continue using a feed aggregator like MyYahoo, NewsGator, Feed Demon and others. If you're using a feed aggregator, which one do you use, and why?

[bwelford]

I am using Bloglines with a notifier for my Firefox 1.0 default browser and I'm raving about the efficiency of this set-up. I only look at New Items on a short list from my full list of 40 or so newsfeeds. It really is sweet. I've cancelled many of my e-mail alert services.

[Nick W]

Bloglines is the dogs doodahs for speed and efficiency as bwelford said.

Hey bwelford, how does the FF notification work then? - It's a toolbar right? i did install it, and it was ok but it didnt notify me of anything? - ive been just checking my bloglines page every hour or two so anything that could improve my already quite slick time management would be a bonus

Cheers

[bwelford]

Hi, Nick, it's a small windows program that then produces a small icon in that little Task tray down at the bottom right hand corner of my screen in Windows XP. Whenever one of my chosen newsfeeds has a new item, there is a small Tool tip indicating the number of new items which disappears and then the icon changes to indicate New Items on hand. Although Bloglines only checks each newsfeed once per hour they're all on different cycles so you can get Alerts quite often.

[Nick W]

Oh, right! thought you meant the bloglines firefox toolbar!

Guess im sticking with a bookmark to bloglines then hehe.. though i have promised myself to try out the Sage extension for FF - it comes highly recommended and apparently will do much the same as bloglines but from your FF sidepanel

thanks mate..

[dannysullivan]

I use Newsgator. It flows posts into Outlook, so for me, it's like reading mailing lists. I can also view all the posts on one pseudo-page. Sometimes I do that, but sometimes there's simply too much off-topic stuff for some of the blogs I have subscriptions to that it's just easier to go folder by folder and blow things away.

[Nick W]

Danny, is the chap at newsgator a mate of yours or somthing? I just got an email from him heh...

Shame i cant try it out, we're a linux only household here in nowheresville

Nick

[seomontreal]

I tried a couple of different tools and like this one the best so far. It is free, intuitive to use, etc.

It runs in my system tray and pops up every hour or so with the latest headlines which I can either choose to read or not.

My only negative is that I cannot delete multiple feeds at one time or move multiple feeds to a new folder at one time.

Price was definitely right!

[I, Brian]

Crikey - pub sub simply seems to be calling up blogs simply on the basis of mentioning the selected keyword, rather than any kind of filtering by theme. For example, for the keyword "internet" I have an pubsub entry which is nothing more than a website log containing the word "internet" posted in the code. And a lot of general political rantings have also come up.

It's an interesting system, but so far my key concern is that Pubsub really needs some kind of topic filtering.

What also interesting is that none of the industry blogs I have on my Bloglines aggregator are actually coming up, even though they have covered stories that include the keywords.

Jury still out, I guess.

Disclaimer - I work on this product (and use it many hours a day).

If you are checking out various readers and still haven't found one that fits your groove, I urge you to try jyte. jyte is a client app (mac,linux & windows). It does native keyword (and boolean expression) searching like pubsub.

The client also maintains state on the server - so you can read some news in the morning at home and resume where you left off when you get to the office (and then home again).

larry-

[Brad]

Bloglines, works great for me. I like it being web based so I can access from any computer.

[Nick W]

Here's an interesting thought regarding Aggregators: When will we see the first Ad Block Aggregator? ~ Doc Searls

Im thinking of adding micro navigation to mine over the weekend

[Kal]

I like Feed Reader. It's fast, updates every 5 mins and you can add your fav feeds if they're not listed.

I use Jyte.

Jyte is easy to use, and has keyword/boolean search built in. I also like how it keeps my settings and feeds, so I never have to read the same post twice no matter where I go. I'm reading more news than ever.

I also dig Jyte because it is free

[mesadynamics]

Well, as the author, I'm unobjectively fond of Tickershock, an RSS and Atom aggregator for Mac OS X that presents feeds in a scrolling ticker like CNN headline news.

And if you don't mind occasional ads for my company's other products (e.g. theConcept a keyphrase analysis tool), Tickershock can be used for free.

For Windows users, this RSS reader appears to be similar, though I have no experience with it.

[Jenstar]

I use FeedReader as well. I also distribute RSS feeds from several message boards, so i am looking forward to the day AdSense will allow me to display my own AdSense in my feeds - I realize they probably never will, but a girl can dream

[I, Brian]

I love bloglines.

I'm subscribed to around 40 industry blogs, and plus a few major sites, and logging the stories most interesting for my own blog. There's a ton of info to go through - I've done a blog run today already, yet there's already 42 items to go back to.

But I love information - that was the entire reason I came to the internet in the first place - and that's why I've built a few reference sites across diverse areas.

I'm really enjoying doing my business & marketing news blog at the moment, though no doubt I'll calm down a little soon and become a little more discerning on what I cover, and add much more personalised commentary on the stories as well. For the moment...information is everything.

[Nick W]

Im enjoying reading it

[andrewgoodman]

I've been using a personalized My Yahoo page since at least 1997 (I know because one of the dummy stock portfolios I still have saved is "1997 portfolio"). As much as possible I have continued to use Yahoo as an info organizer due to inertia and convenience. Recently I've begun adding more RSS feeds of all shapes and stripes to My Yahoo. Sometimes I even read them.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by Nick W

Im enjoying reading it

Pfft! I'm too vain to call you a liar, tho'.

Just keep ahead with your own.