WSG Newsletter:
RSS Newsreaders Deliver Headlines
Issue: February 28, 2003
 People for whom
news is a passion, an obligation, or perhaps an addiction should have as their
tool of first choice a news aggregator that picks up RSS news feeds
RSS and newsreaders have been around for donkey’s years. Netscape
developed the RSS format in 1999 to push news headlines to the MyNetscape
portal. The implementation proved to be too complex for many and Netscape
dropped it, but UserLand, another pioneer, persisted. Over time, syndicated
news feeds and use of RSS powered the very successful Moreover for news
delivery and fueled the creation of special-purpose newsreaders for aggregating
news.
Today news hounds, news junkies, journalists, techies, and some librarians
use newsreaders to stay current with updates from news sources on the Web,
favourite weblogs, and selected web sites.
In this newsletter we demystify RSS – it’s really very simple,
consider the range of sources, learn how to find RSS feeds, and then try out
three news readers plus Netscape 7.0.
What is RSS?
Mainly RSS is a format for distributing content. It is XML-based –
meaning it has some definitions to say this is the channel, this is the title,
this is the link, and this is the description. Readers can interpret these tags
in an XML defined file and display them properly.
RSS has been variously defined at really simple syndication – the most
descriptive, rich site summary, remote site summary, RDF site summary. The last
introduced a new acronym – rich document format. They are all site
summaries.
The content of the RSS file is almost exclusively headlines with a short
description or abstract and a link to the full story. There might also be a
small image or photo.
The Newsreader
RSS files have URLs. The Newsreader checks the urls for updates at set time
intervals or when you tell it too. Display varies according to the newsreader.
Some are very sequential, with headlines scrolling down the page (AmphetaDesk),
some might have a newspaper format of columns (Newsisfree), and at least one
(NewzCrawler) does it email style with three window panes. We look at all of
these later in this newsletter.
Who is doing it?
A lot of sites do it.
Big news sites – New York Times, BBC, ABC News, Cnet news, Globe and
Mail – produce an RSS file with just the headlines and short summary. They
may produce several files according to the section – arts, business,
technology, health.
The Christian Science Monitor is one newspaper that has embraced RSS. J.D.
Lasica in his enthusiastic
article
about newsreaders in the Online Journalism Review reported:
“The Christian Science Monitor has been at the forefront of
the news industry in embracing news readers, making summaries available of its
technology, books, commentary and other sections and offering an
easy-to-understand primer on RSS for newbies. The Monitor's RSS feed of the
entire day's paper is the only one of its kind from a major publisher.”
Online magazines do it –Salon and Slate.
Bloggers do it – especially the ones dealing with computers,
programming and the Web. GoogleVillage.info, as an example, is picked up by the
Moreover syndicated news delivery and can be directly read in a newsreader.
Smaller web sites are in the fray too. Tara Calashain produces an RSS file
for her ResearchBuzz
website. There is also Genie Tyburski’s
Virtual Chase for law
librarians.
Sites, and especially bloggers, that produce an XML feed often put a marker
on their page. Click on it to get the address of the RSS
file to add to your newsreader.
Many RSS files are created by scrapers – programs written by other
people to read the web page, identify and extract the headlines. Business Week
is scrapped, most of Reuters News is likely scraped (Reuters E-Health is XML).
The disadvantage of scrapping, as the process is called, is that the feed
breaks when the layout of the webpage is changed.
Finding and Getting Feeds
The largest listing of feeds is at Syndic8.com with more than 15,000 and growing. Jeff Barr
built Syndic8 in 2001 to be a clearinghouse of feeds and to encourage content
sites to create RSS files. Anyone who is creating an RSS feed will want to get
listed here.
Feeds are somewhat organized under Categories, most drawn from Open Project
Directory. A better way is to search the Feeds by name, such as Globe for Globe
and Mail, National Post, and other short names. Syndic8 has 21 feeds matching
on the word Canada, and 13 for Canadian – some serious business, like
debates from the House of Commons, and others lighter fare, like Mike
Fox’s weblog. Syndic8 marks the feed as either XML (generated at source),
or scrapped.
NewsisFree,
although a newsreader and a syndicator, may be used as a directory. It has
nicely categorized over 4,000 feeds, some native or original source files, and
others scrapped by NewsisFree itself. It’s easy to find whether a feed
exists. It’s harder to get the address. One must dig through
NewisFree’s information pages about a source to find out if there is a
direct XML feed (marked by
) or if the source is available for syndication from
Newsisfree (). If so, use that link to get to the next
page with a link to the RSS file address. (
Blogstreet’s RSS Discovery (http://www.blogstreet.com/rssdiscovery.html) helps one
find RSS files for weblogs either by a keyword search and an alphabetical
listing. Count is up to 5,379 weblogs in February 2003.
Some news sources encourage you to take their feeds.
When you can’t find an XML/RSS address, you can create your own through
MyRSS. As the site
says: “myRSS allows you to create your own RSS feed for any news-oriented
website. You don't need to know how to program or understand any of the XML and
RDF incantations to get RSS to work. Simply type in the address of the page you
want the feed produced from and let myRSS do all the work automatically. Your
feed will be instantly available and better still you can use it for almost any
purpose for free”. MyRSS has a channel catalog and search. It is here that
we’ll find the New Yorker among many other enticing feeds.
MyRSS is the creation of Innovateer Ltd, a small company in England that has
also developed software for creating and sharing notebooks called Pepys, the
natural hypertext notebook.
Newsreaders
There are many shapes and sizes of newsreaders. This is only a sampling of
the main ones in the news. There is a longer list at
Open Directory Project – RSS: News Readers.
NewsisFree
NewisFree is a
web-based service developed by Mike Krus in Switzerland. Selected feeds may be
organized by channel – business, health, whimsy etc – and viewed
either in columns, newspaper style, or as a log – content by source down
the page. There is a premium service that gives access to archived headlines.
Premium also buys the option to add RSS feeds not on the NewisFree list.
NewisFree has the very significant advantage of being accessible from any
computer. You don’t have to lug your notebook.
AmphetaDesk
AmphetaDesk (http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/) is a free download for
Mac, Windows or Linux and works inside the browser. The software just looks
after subscribing to channels – from the AmphetaDesk list of over 5,000 or
addresses you add yourself. Presentation is as one long scrolling page.
AmphetaDesk can also help you subscribe to Yahoo Groups (publicly available
archives only), feeds listed in NewsIsFree, Moreover and several others. Tips
are at
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/finding_more.html
 NewzCrawler
NewzCrawler (http://www.newzcrawler.com/) is another level of
sophistication. This is a full desktop Windows application developed by a
Russian pair. It has function coming out its menubar. It handles feeds from RSS
channels, updates from newsgroups, and bookmarked web pages. Channels and
webpages are easy to add and organize into folders. A search function finds all
headlines with a keyword. Updates can be scheduled. There is an RSS automatic
recognition facility. As well, bloggers can post to their weblogs from inside
NewzCrawler. Technical support is also very good, judging from the quick
response I received from my inquiry.
Anyone who gets addicted to news feeds will want this at the low cost of
$29.95 US.
 UserLand
Userland, one of the pioneers of RSS, also offers a combination newsreader
and blog poster for $39.95 – Windows and Mac. (http://radio.userland.com)
Netscape Browser 6.0 +
 Netscape didn’t give up the idea. The tabs it introduced
in the left side panel in version 6.0 can be used to add news feeds. Sometimes
you’ll see a Add Netscape Tab.
Conclusion
Newsreaders compete directly with newsletters – the kind from
newspapers that just have headlines and abstracts, alerts from services like
Net2One, and webpage
monitoring services like Watchthatpage. None is comprehensive and each has its
attractive qualities. Newsreaders, for one, don’t have ads. They may do a
better job at aggregating the news we want to see. Unlike, webpage monitoring
services, they don’t support filtering on keywords – but maybe one
day. In fact,
Infominder, a webpage monitoring service with keyword alerts,
will produce RSS files that could be picked up in a newsreader.
Getting started doesn’t have to be complex but it may take some
patience. NewisFree is a good starting point because it has the excellent
directory and a reasonably readable and useable interface.
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References