Roundup at the RSS Corral
The electronic investor in today's Barron's has a roundup of RSS syndication feed applications that I think mostly gets it right.
The piece mentions the following syndication readers: RSS-Reader as a lightweight standalone RSS reader (it lets you paste feeds in or choose from a list, and is free), FeedDemon ($29.95), Newsgator Outlook Edition ($29, integrates with Outlook), and Pluck (free, either standalone or an Internet Explorer plug-in). Also noted, the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client feature built-in (albeit a bit clunky) RSS reading.
These are all reasonable software choices for reading syndication feeds (whether RSS or Atom). The piece also mentions the issue of finding feeds, suggests several directories of feeds, and notes My Yahoo provides access to a claimed 150,000 feeds as well as a Web viewer for the feeds.
The conclusion: "RSS is still a bit too, well, pushy for our tastes. Do you really need another set of interruptions added to your day...Many investment and news sites already offer more targeted e-mail alerts for must-have news."
I agree that we don't need any more interruptions in our lives, but the Electronic Trader misses the utility of syndication for delivering certain kinds of information. My Syndication Viewer and Feedly are designed to get around the "too pushy" problem of syndication viewers. No special software is required, just a normal Web browser. You visit the sites when you want. You don't have to search through massive feed directories (or search the Web for feeds), because the best feeds (and only the best feeds) are presented. (Feedly presents six top feeds on a rotating basis, Syndication Viewer provides a moderately extensive categorized list of feeds.)
You can bookmark the feed or feeds you are personally interested in for future reference. For example, the SEC EDGAR feed of insider trading provides a great mechansim for getting insider trading information on a timely basis with both a granularity and an ease of scanning that is hard to duplicate elsewhere.
Posted by Harold Davis at March 5, 2005 10:00 AM
