NewsGator: RSS Feed Reader With Reach
Anyone that has tried to keep up with the news knows that it’s no simple matter. TV, radio, tens of newspapers, and hundreds of places on the internet to keep up with make just staying up on the latest events a full time job, but web 2.0 has a solution to this problem. Every news outlet, including newspapers, TV, and blogs have feeds - brief versions of their latest news - which let users import their stories and items into their favorite reader. You’ve probably seen the orange button with the white arcs loosely representing radio signals. That’s the universal icon for RSS, and pressing on the button will bring up the RSS version of that page, with feeds that you can import into RSS readers as you like.
So why use RSS? The advantage is that as you combine all of your RSS’s (often referred to as feeds) together you can see all the latest stories at once, refreshed instantly and with a fraction of the time necessary to go to each site. Imagine seeing all the latest stories from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and your favorite blog all on the same page, with each headline linked to the original story. Sounds convenient, right?
This is where NewsGator comes in. RSS feeds are links to the source - references if you will, so to get the benefits and interaction out of them you need a reader that can combine them. NewsGator not only combines your feeds into an easily readable page, but it lets you sort and organize them as you wish. To see how it works, let’s walk through it.
After a quick sign and a selection (optional) of feeds already gathered by NewsGator that you may like, NewsGator opens with a default of three panels. Each has a specific purpose, and to make the navigation easy there is plenty of open space on the page. There are navigational links from your folders and a search field on the left, a wide section in the center to read your feeds, and thumbnail selection of today’s popular videos (fed by YouTube) over a selection of popular tags from the day’s feeds on the right. If you wish you can take away the videos with the link to the Settings page.
Let’s get things set up. The first thing we’ll want to do is add our feeds. If we’ve already gone to our favorite site and copied the RSS feed url, we go to the “Add Feeds” link on the navigation bar, or we may want to go to “Browse Feeds” to find topics we like. Either link we choose, the same options open up. There are now five tabs in the center panel, each with different ways to add feeds. URL & Import to add in a feed we’ve copied, Find Feeds gives us a category list, Recommended Feeds, Smart Feeds lets you search by keyword, and Browse Feeds lets you choose bundles of feeds based on topics.
Once we’ve added our feeds, we’ll want to set how we see them, so we click on the Settings link in the navigational bar. The first of the four tabs that opens lets us choose how we view our feeds: how they are sorted, which tags we see, or whether we see headlines, summaries, or full articles. The next tab lets us organize our folders and move our tabs around. For example, we might want to keep our news sites in a separate folder than our Listio feed so when we want just the latest in web 2.0, we’re not sifting through the news. The next tab is My Feeds, which gives you an editable list of all your feeds. Laid out like a chart you can remove them, edit them, or refresh them. The last tab is for editing locations, so you can change where you view your feeds. For mobile users with a data plan, NewsGator has a client you can download into your phone that will sync up to the online version, users with Media Center can use NewsGator to watch TV content, and users who prefer email can get an email version of their feeds.
If NewsGator has a downside, it is that the daily recommended feeds that come when you click on “Home” do not change with the thumbs up and thumbs down icons (this is the only screen with them), and you are left with news that is not what you want. This isn’t much of a downside, though, since a quick click on one your folders and your feeds come up. Once your feeds are in place NewsGator does everything you would want from a feed reader, offering you the ability to send an email of the story, add to your clippings for reference, tag the post so you can find it again, and even showing how many subscribers are seeing that feed.
To find NewsGator or other RSS readers, there is the Listio search: RSS+manage.
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Tags: find, manage, news, organize, read, rss, search
Posted in: RSS Reader | Respond
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