May 3, 2006 
I’m a huge fan of aggregate news. Over the past year I have used many services to have all the most recent news delievered to me in an easy to browse form. There have been a ton of different webpages that have hit the scene within the past few months to help users bring all the info the web has to offer in one easy to read page.
I first got hooked on the webnews addiction with news.google. I later became exposed to the world of rss feeds. RSS, to put it simply, lists the headlines and sometimes a clipping of an article from a website. It takes out all the form and layout of a webpage and just delivers the content. For someone who just wants to know what is new, thats all I need. I started using RSS but couldn’t fine a suitable program to deliver all of my needs. Yahoo and Microsoft started their push into the personal webportal which allowed you to create a page that contained RSS feeds. Google soon created a similar feature at google.com/ig. I decided to use google’s service and have had it as my homepage ever since. The probelm is that most of these personal webportals would display the entire feed and only limit you to the most recent 5 or 10 articles. So you couldn’t go back and look at what you had already missed. It was either the most current, or nothing at all. Then I discovered bloglines.
Bloglines is what I’ve been using for the past 6 months. It will allow you to sumbit as many rss feeds as you want then organize them into folders for viewing whenever you want. The best part I like about it is that it remebers what you have already viewed on the web. So if I look at a feed from work it will mark it as read and then when I go home only show me the feeds that I haven’t read yet. It is a great time waster and allows me to (view) browse 10x more data in 1/10th of the time.
A little while back del.icio.us and digg came onto the scene. These two sites would allow users to submit articles from all over the internet and if an article was popular it became more visable. I would visit these sites as well as my blogroll on bloglines and a few other popularity web feeders. It has come to the point where I need to condense all my daily visits again. My goal is to be able to go to one site and get all my news as well as “whats popular” on the web. There are now even more services than ever that are trying to deliver your daily news. Today alone I’ve come across Spotback, newsvine, newsgator, findory and that doesn’t even count other services like flurl, fark, slashdot, live.com or drudgereport. The main thing that inspired me to write this post was a site that just went live 2 weeks ago popurls. It combines al the top urls from all these top url gathering sites and even includes media sites like flickr or youtube. Every site has its pros and cons. With many sites using AJAX and Web2.0 features, the battle for your personalized news delivery and webportal is a fiece and growing one.
Gasp… I’m exauhsted just thinking about all the info.
You may have noticed the post below this a test posting from flickr. Well for those of you that are wondering, I have decided to let flickr do all of my picture storage. I really wanted to use my enormouse amount of space that I own here on timjanderson.com, but flickr just makes the most sense. Plus it’s the cool thing to do. So currently I am uploading everything (2 gig a month limit may slow that process down) and giving it some organization. Soon you’ll be able to see all the pictures in all their flickr fancy format.
In Progress - Viewable Here
