Finally, the next installment of the “What Is…” Series. If you haven’t already, read the previous article - The “What is…” Series: RSS - as I will allude to it in this write-up. I didn’t get much feedback on the last article, and I’m figuring it was too long and not many people read it, so I’ll try to keep this one much shorter.

Q: What are Aggregators/News Readers/Feed Readers?

A: Technical answer:

A news aggregator is a piece of software or a remotely hosted service that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats (primarily RSS), finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page.

There are primarily three kinds:

• Desktop news aggregators
• Online news aggregators
• Server side aggregators

- from Wikipedia

What does that mean?

In the explanation of RSS, you’ll remember that I said that you could basically create your own custom newspaper using RSS. An aggregator is the way to do that, the actual “paper” part of this newspaper. An aggregator will take all your RSS feeds (which are essentially unreadable by themselves) and put them into a readable format in a central location. The aggregator will check all your feeds periodically for new content - automatically. Rather than going to 50 different sites and checking them for new content, an aggregator will do this for you.

So, to create my newspaper, I take the RSS feeds from various sites and plug them into an aggregator?

Yes, you’ll subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular site, and all the headlines and either part or all of the content will be displayed within the aggregator. Each aggregator has a different mechanism for adding an RSS feed, but most are as simple as entering the address of the website. They can figure out the RSS feed automatically. However, some will require that you enter the address of the RSS feed.

What are some examples of aggregators?

As mentioned earlier, there are three classes of aggregators - desktop, online and server side.

I’ll be focusing on desktop and online aggregators, since server side aggregators require your own server and software, which most people don’t have and if you do, you wouldn’t need this article to tell you what an aggregator is.

Desktop (or standalone) aggregators are programs that are installed on your computer. Some examples of desktop aggregators, both free and commercial, are FeedDemon, NewsGator, RSSBandit and SharpReader. Aggregators of this type retrieve content from the internet and store it locally, on your computer, for reading at your convenience.

Online aggregators are web-based, basically websites. Examples are Bloglines, MyYahoo, MyMSN and NewsIsFree. Online aggregators keep the content on the websites servers, so you’ll have to login to read the new content.

Which one should I use?

It’s totally up to you, depending on your preferences. I use Bloglines and prefer the web-based, online aggregators. By using a web-based aggregator, I have all my feeds available no matter what computer I’m at. I can login and check my feeds from school, work, or home and I won’t miss any new posts.

Desktop aggregators are good because they will download all the content from the internet for you, and then you can read them whenever you want, without having to stay connected. For example, say that you’re taking a flight some where. Use your desktop aggregator to download all the new posts from your feeds while you’re waiting in the airport, and then read then while you’re in flight. You can’t do that with an online aggregator.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to what you’re most comfortable with and which aggregator has an interface that you like and can use the most easily. If you’re anything like me and have hundreds of blogs that you like to keep up with, you better have an aggregator that’s easy on the eyes and that makes it easy to scan through the tons of new posts that you’ll be reading. Bloglines is my newsreader of choice for this reason and because of the simple interface, ease at which I can add new blogs, the plugins for Firefox that are available for it, etc. Different strokes for different folks, though… You’ll find many free aggregators out there (many of the ones I listed are free) and there’s nothing wrong with taking each for a test drive.

For an example of an aggregator, check out my bloglines account.

Next up: Trackback

Was this post helpful to you? Too long or short? Too technical? Leave me a comment with your thoughts or additional questions. Your feedback will help me with future articles like this.

To those of you who may be reading this that know more about aggregators and feeds than I do, please feel free to correct anything that I may have gotten wrong. Thanks!

Sources used for this article include the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator