Blogs and News Aggregators without the Aggravation (and Only a Little Serendipity)

Blogs and News Aggregators without the Aggravation (and Only a Little Serendipity)

My first article on this subject was an introduction to web logs, written from a blogging librarian’s perspective. In the three months since then, blogs have been noticed even more by the media, from Law.com, the Wall Street Journal, and even the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

This second installment will focus on some of the tools which will enable you to find and use web logs in your work.

I only made an oblique reference to news aggregators in my previous article. In some ways that was putting the cart before the horse, because most people would prefer to read web blogs a little before starting their own. Of course it is possible to read blogs without an aggregator, but you would be depriving yourself of aggregators’ aggravation-reducing features. One of the big conveniences is that they will tell you when new content has appeared on the sites you are interested in. This works out to be so much easier than manually checking a site in your bookmarks to see if it’s been updated or not. For example, my blog, explodedlibrary.info is certainly not usually updated every day. But if the blog is in your aggregator, you don’t have to worry about my irregular updating schedule – because the aggregator will tell you when something new is there.

Another big convenience is that news aggregators do not just provide access to web logs. You may decide (mistakenly, I think), that you do not care what gurus such as Howard, Denise, Ernie or Jenny think about current issues. Even so, you still need an aggregator because there is a trend of established publishers providing information in RSS feeds. You can now subscribe to RSS versions of Law.com, the New York Times, the BBC, Salon.com and a large number of technology publications. Even some metropolitan newspapers are getting into this. One of the nice things about subscribing to an RSS feed is that there’s little to no lag between when the information is published and when it’s available online. This compares favourably to clipping services in LexisNexis, Westlaw, Dialog and Factiva – depending on the particular publication, of course.

Sidebar:
Some of the most popular aggregators

Aggie
AmphetaDesk
Blogtrack
Feedreader
LiveJournal
MacReporter
NetNewsWire Lite
NewsIsFree
NewzCrawler*
Radio Userland*
For the links to these and a few others, see this Open Directory list

In these days of computer homogeneity, when almost all of us use the same operating system at work, and the same sort of browser and word processor – news aggregators are a refreshing (or annoying, depending on your point of view) area where there are a lot of possible choices. It is very difficult to make a one size-fits-all recommendation for news aggregators. The right answer will vary according to your circumstances, tastes and budget.

At this point my favourite aggregator is Radio Userland, but that’s because I already use this software for blogging – and it’s very convenient to plug articles straight from my aggregator into my blog. There are generally two types of news aggregators. NewzCrawler is one of the more popular examples of the software with a 3-pane interface that is similar to Microsoft Outlook. NewzCrawler costs $25, but similar software such as Feedreader is available for free. The other sort of news aggregators uses the web browser as its main interface. Examples of this include amphetaDesk and Radio Userland. Personally I prefer these browser-based aggregators because I can do more scrolling and less clicking, which makes for easier skimming. Several good news aggregators also exist for Mac OS X, including MacReporter and NetNewsWire Lite.

You may wish to test-drive several different aggregators at once to find out which one works best for you. Once you have chosen your aggregator, you need to fill it with some feeds. There are a few different ways of doing this. The serendipitous way is stumble over a web site that you like which has the small orange XML rectangular icon – or words to the effect of subscribing to the site’s RSS or RDF feed. Clicking on that icon – or following one of those links will bring you to the XML version of the page, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to non-programming people. The important thing to do here is copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and then paste it into the appropriate area of your news aggregator.

Of course serendipity is not usually the guiding principle of a library. Could you imagine a library catalogue based on serendipity? We generally prefer more systematic ways of finding information sources. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be one single place on the web which lists all the different available blogs and news feeds, sorted into helpful and consistent categories. There are some useful places to look, such as Syndic8 and News Is Free. Also, each of the main blog software vendors (Blogger, Movable Type and Radio Userland) offer lists of recently updated and most read blogs.

Another underrated free news source is Moreover and it is possible to subscribe to any Moreover topic in a news aggregator. Each Moreover topic will have the text “o=portal” somewhere in its URL. Paste the URL into your aggregator, but make sure that you replace the “o=portal” with “o=rss.” This information comes from amphetaDesk’s very helpful page on finding new channels.

I wanted to close this article with some helpful hints for searching the “blogosphere” (as web log community sometimes calls itself) for information about a particular issue or company. Unfortunately there is no equivalent to Google which searches only blog entries. You can find blog entries on Google, but then they are treated just like any other web page. Thus they only become visible or prominent in Google when other pages link to them, which is often a good thing.

A site called Daypop was very helpful to find blogs which mention your particular search terms. Unfortunately, Daypop is currently very unreliable and for this reason I cannot recommend it. When it works, it is great. It even had a list of top web pages which bloggers are linking to (and usually discussing) on any given day. But right now, Daypop is down, totally down – and this is not the first time this has happened.

The next best site is Blogdex. The site suffers from poor documentation – with no FAQ or user-friendly description of the site’s scope or how it works. It also has a list of the web pages which bloggers are linking to – often news headlines of the day, such as U.S. school students not being able to locate Iraq on a map (on 11/21/02). Using “track this site”, it is possible to view which blogs are linking to each story. Blogdex also has a search function. It is possible to search for terms in a site’s URL in addition to its body – which I like. This makes it possible to see which blogs are linking to llrx.com or to a company like usbank.com (this could be one way of finding a disgruntled customer or employee blog). On the other hand, there’s no description of how Blogdex’s search engine works – I’m guessing that it puts ORs between words by default. Another short-coming is that Blogdex only seems to index web logs created with Blogger or Movable Type.

Bloghop is quite an interesting site for searching blogs. Its most obvious limitation is that it only searches a self-selected sample of blogs – those which have been submitted by registered users. The interesting twist is that each web log is rated by the other Bloghop registered users, so Bloghop also has a limited peer-review function. I had a fairly good impression of their search engine. Bloghop might be useful for searchers who are more interested in relevance than recall.

Blogs and aggregators remind me of the halcyon days of the internet in the early to mid-1990s. Less commercial but also less polished. Much of the software and the content is created by amateurs who have a different day job to pay the bills. Much can be found, but things do not always work smoothly.

Although librarians were early adopters of the world wide web, this was not generally recognized outside of the profession. Hopefully things will be different this time. It’s gratifying to see that in the Google directory, “Library & Information Science” is one of its major categories of blogs. And so it should be, because the combination of chaos and information is a situation which cries out for librarians to be involved.

© Copyright 2003 Morgan Wilson. Last update: 5/14/03; 12:54:45 AM.