News aggregators

Dear Ram, Here is an article that I wrote for my company's internal newsletter last week.

What is a news aggregator? A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page." A few months back, we had seen about weblogs. Aggregators and weblog software are two sides of the same coin. Weblogs are for writing, while aggregators are for reading. How does it work? Every hour the aggregator reads the "feeds" or "sources" you're subscribed to, as few as a half-dozen, or as many as you like. The information is displayed it in a user-friendly format, one for each source. How do I get to read news? A computer, running an aggregator software, reads information from various sources. There are a wide range of sources, news websites, weblogs and even commercial sites. A search on google for "news aggregators" lists a range of software for reading news. There are news aggregator software for various operating systems. Recently Indian Express and Financial Express (the first from any Indian news website) have put up a "feed" containing the headlines, a brief description and links back to the full story available on their websites. Mostly all the "feed" available on the Internet are free. The news aggregator is an example of how technology can be used as an informative medium.

Hope you understood it. More on this tomorrow or the day after.