More News on Demand

News on Demand - RSS Reader Reviews in PC World

PC World's July issue has my review of five RSS aggregator programs and a sampler of sites worth subscribing to with them, plus a Web supplement table that adds a baker's dozen more reviews to the package. That's 18 mini-reviews online... and I reviewed another five aggregatprs, as explained below.

The PC World article also links to an earlier RSS backgrounder by Eric Dahl, the editor who pulled my story into a shape (and length) that fit the magazine's space available! (His article works nicely with this weblog's orange-tag explanation page.)

In the process of crowding deadlines, I did overestimate how much time or space would be available for the online supplement to the print edition. Five of my 23 news reader reviews didn't make it into that final Web table, so I've posted them here. They include free online aggregators from Feedster and Yahoo, an Outlook plugin called IntraVnews and two interesting standalone programs, NewzCrawler and WinRSS.

There are other representatvies of those categories in the main story and table. For a fairly narrow software category, aggregator developers certainly have found a variety of approaches to putting newsfeeds on your computer screen. That's great, because I think users will have a variety of preferences for reading RSS feeds. The new Really Simple Syndication community discussion site is exploring some of those issues, and gives people an opportunity to post their own reviews.

Meanwhile, since it was PC World commissioning the article, I didn't formally review any Macintosh-only software -- but I can add here that NetNewsWire, Shrook and PulpFiction for the Macintosh are all up to the competition from the best Windows-only aggregators. (The online RSS reader services as well as multiplatform and Mozilla browser plug-in RSS readers listed on the PC World chart are equally accessible for Mac users.)

I also have some rough notes on aggregator characteristics available for discussion.

© Copyright 2009 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/27/09; 3:57:31 AM.