For the past several years I have used a traditional RSS reader. Over time, and roughly in order, I’ve used SharpReader, RSS Bandit, Bloglines, FeedDemon, and Google Reader. Lately I’ve been seeing more talk amongst various tech folks about leveraging a widget-driven start page as a dashboard view of incoming information. As someone with about 350 feeds that I read in a River of News style, I wasn’t sure how a dashboard could work for me but the idea was intriguing.

Justin Kistner has posted recently about the usage of several tools which combine to provide a powerful market dashboard for the CMO of Jive Software. Justin also happens to be the guy behind Beer and Blog, so when this week’s topic was dashboards I decided to head down to the Lucky Lab yesterday afternoon to talk about information aggregation.

My first question was how one would have a useful information portal with 350 feeds, and the short answer is that you don’t. Using tools such as Yahoo Pipes and AideRSS, the feeds are combined, filtered, and sorted to bring the important information to the top. Justin showed some specific examples and now as I’m reading feeds in Google Reader tonight I’m looking at a lot of items that really are just wasted bits, sandwiched between the things I care about.

So… I’m going to build a dashboard. I’m going to attempt to put some thought into the process, so the first thing I’ll be doing is taking an inventory of my feeds, giving each one a rough category and priority so that I can start to visualize how many pages I’ll want, and how those pages might be arranged. Once I get things a bit organized, I’ll write another post here that talks about my plan.

I see that Justin has posted his notes from the meetup, if you want to read more about what sparked this project.

[tags]dashboards, netvibes, feeds, rss, yahoopipes, justinkistner, beerandblog[/tags]

Back in the good old days… say… a couple years ago, I evaluated a bunch of feed readers, and gladly plopped down my $30 for a registered, paid version of FeedDemon. I used it for several months, then Google Reader came along, I tried it out, switched back and forth a few times, but I eventually settled on Google’s online offering. It worked well, was accessible from anywhere, and had a decent mobile offering that works on my Blackberry.

Since then, a few things have changed. FeedDemon was purchased by Newsgator, which means that it can synchronize between multiple computers and other products. Nick Bradbury, the primary developer, has continued to add new features to FeedDemon in response to customer requests. And last month, Newsgator released all of their client products for free.

I decided to give FeedDemon another shot, and Friday morning I downloaded and installed the client on my PC at work. I also installed Newsgator Go! which is the mobile version of their aggregator.

I must say I’m impressed. Using keyboard navigation in the FeedDemon client, I can get through feeds just as quick as with Google Reader. You can “clip” and article which saves a full-text copy locally as well as (optionally) synchronizing the clipped items across multiple PCs. Being a “fat client” app there are some nice GUI features that aren’t yet implemented on web-based readers. The only downside is that it seems to be a bit harder to quickly get through feeds on their mobile reader.

For now, I’m switching to FeedDemon and the Newsgator synch. I love the UI and it’s not any slower than Google. Once I spend more time mobile I’ll be able to better evaluate the BlackBerry version.

[tags]feeddemon, newsgator, googlereader, feeds, rss, aggregators[/tags]

As we move farther and farther into a digital age filled with information sources, the feed aggregator becomes a collective information inbox. By using a powerful feed reader, one can read, categorize, prioritize, and share the various bits of data coming into view with a minimal amount of information management overhead. I use my feed reader to gather news, technical discussions, hobby-related discussion information, interesting photos from Flickr, event information, and news from in-person groups where I participate.

Over time, I’m finding that information without feeds tends to get forgotten. This includes websites without feeds, discussion forums, and other online amusements that don’t serialize well into RSS or Atom. There’s a few of these sites where I kick myself when I realize I haven’t read them in a weeks, but for the most part, using a feed aggregator as my information funnel has worked out well. For better or for worse, the reality is becoming that if it’s not in my feed reader, it doesn’t exist (to me).

[tags]feeds, rss, aggregators, googlereader, information[/tags]