BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM |
NEWSREADING WITH RSS |
Some people like the power of these dedicated programs. Your feeds are not portable if they are tied to the computer in which the program is installed (unless the computer is a laptop, which can be carried around). Even if you install the program on all your computers, each copy cannot track your reading in the other copies.
This is important because most newsreaders do not show you the same entries more than once unless you deliberately backtrack to previousLY viewed entries. (Or, if the newsreader shows you entries that you’ve already seen, those entries are marked as having been read.)
Some desktop newsreaders are commercial programs; others are shareware programs that you can try for free; still others are completely free. Portal newsreaders: Giant information platforms are building feed subscription and reading into their home pages and other products. Yahoo! is a good example; that popular online service allows users of the My Yahoo! personalized home page feature to easily subscribe to feeds without leaving Yahoo! Google also has a home page customization feature that allows unlimited feed subscriptions; likewise, Google has put feedreading into the Google Sidebar (which is part of Google Desktop). Use of these services is free.
Browser and e-mail add-ons: RSS is worming its way into application programs such as e-mail and Web browsers. NewsGator runs within Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail program. The Firefox browser and its companion e-mail reader, Thunderbird, both support RSS reading. Firefox recognizes the presence of an RSS feed anywhere on a Web page and displays a small icon inviting you to subscribe. Clicking that icon creates a “live bookmark” in the bookmark list; running the mouse over that live bookmark expands it to reveal links to the current entries embedded in the feed. (See Figure The “live bookmark” turns the Bookmarks menu in Firefox into a small, yet functional, newsreader. Clicking an
entry takes you to the entry page. Firefox and Thunderbird are free;NewsGator is shareware. Newsreading within the browser (the last choice in the list) is regarded by some as the future of RSS. Meanwhile, Yahoo! has quietly become one of the foremost providers of newsreading services, thanks to its enormous customer base of My Yahoo! users subscribing like crazy to feeds. The future will unfold in its usual surprising manner, but for the present I am sticking primarily with Web newsreaders, which give me plenty of power and flexibility, while keeping my hunger for information satisfied on any connected computer.
The selection of a newsreader is getting both easier and harder as the choices proliferate. On one hand, making the right choice requires an understanding of the alternatives. On the other hand, RSS feeds are becoming so seamlessly integrated into familiar services that eventually everyone will use them without even knowing it. As a generality, the more you know about newsreaders, the more your choice is likely to incline toward powerful Web or desktop newsreaders. Of course, power comes with a learning curve, but newsreaders are inherently easy to use.
The more feeds you subscribe to, the more you should gravitate toward a Web reader or desktop reader. The portal newsreaders and browser-feed bookmarking features do not place limits on the number of feeds you’re allowed, but long lists of feeds don’t work as well in those environments as they do in windows dedicated to feeds. Most Web and desktop readers allow feed-handling conveniences such as folders and keyword searching.