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I confess to being a news addict. For the past 30 years if I
didn’t start the day with coffee and the New York Times, it was like
my brain wouldn’t boot up. When traveling or living abroad I was
known to haunt airports’ international terminals, looking to score reasonably
recent newspapers off arriving passengers or pilots. So it was
not lightly that I recently cut back my daily subscription to the Times
to Sunday only. The reason was simple – I am in love with my news
aggregator.
I still read the Times everyday, or at least all of the articles that
interest me, but I no longer have to wade through the boring stories
about zoning legislation on Staten Island or the stylishly sexy adds
for wristwatches that cost more than my car. This is because my
news aggregator selects just the stories I am interested in and presents
the headline and lead for my perusal, just as soon as they are posted
to the Times web site, which is usually many hours before they appear
in print.
What is a news aggregator? Simply put, it is a piece of software that
collects and collates whichever of hundred of commercial and private
news feeds you tell it to watch. Whenever you decide to check it, you
get everything posted recently to the services you are interested, including
the New York Times, the BBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, hundreds of topic-specific
feeds, and virtually every Blog available in the Cybersphere.
If you want to check out what a typical News Aggregator looks like,
click on the link called "All
My News Streams" on the right hand margin
of my Blog, the Dowbrigade.
My personal aggregator is built in to Manila, the blogging software in
use at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. If it looks cool to
you, there are many freeware or shareware standalone aggregators that
are easy to
download and set up.
I AM IN LOVE WITH MY AGGREGATOR. It has not only changed the way
I keep up with the news, it has changed my life. It is now the
first thing I check on my computer in the morning and the last thing
I check before I shut it down. When news breaks, it is usually on the
aggregator before it hits CNN or Fox. I follow the latest postings
from Scripting News and Slashdot as they are posted. I follow obscure
and important developments in my field, educational technology.
Ryan
Singel, in Wired, writes that the first time he saw a news aggregator
he felt a rush he hadn’t experienced since he saw his first web page. I
agree. I think this technolgy will have a longer and deeper impact
on the emerging information society than Blogs themselves, which will
eventually settle into a role as one more medium of mass communication,
albeit a highly entertaining, individualistic and idiosyncratic one.
But news aggregators and RSS,
the technology that makes them work, have the potential to become the
Uber-medium through which a wide spectrum
of other information formats pass.
At
present, I have but one substantative complaint about my aggregator. Regardless
of whatever else is going on in my life, it keep aggregating. After
two or three hours, each new story is pushed down the page until it
disappears into the I-zone, off the radar screen of my cybernetic consciousness. If
I happened to be doing something in my so-called "real life" (such
as it is), like earning a living or actually interacting with family
members, and can’t get to my aggregator, I lose lord knows how many
interesting, perhaps even crucial stories. (Yes, I know I have a tendency
to take these things too seriously) How
about a bookmark or cache feature to catch all those features we can’t
afford to miss?
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