First impressions - FeedDemon
I have just installed the trial version of FeedDemon from Bradbury Software the maker of the TopStyle CSS editor.
FeedDemon is an RSS (definition here and here) desktop news aggregator client for Windows. News aggregator - now there’s a mouthful guaranteed to scare off the uninitiated. Wikipedia has a good explanation of what a news aggregator is.
RSS is a standard mechanism for websites - be they a news site (what RSS was originally designed for), a weblog (like mine which you are reading), or anything really - to supply a summary of content on the website page(s). Why would you be interested in a summary of the pages on website? Well if you go to most commercial websites, PC Magazine being a good example, you are bombarded with extraneous content YELLING at you to get your attention. Kind of like driving down an American road being besieged by billboards.
With an RSS feed, which by the way I believe is pull, not push, technology despite what some press websites say, you can download summaries from hundreds of content publishers (websites, blogs) using a standard protocol. Then with client software you should, hopefully, be able to absorb, filter, manage and massage this information in a more effective way - this is where a news aggregator client comes in. The software should provide an interface to allow you to deal with this greatly increased amount of information to get to things which interest you. I’ll see how well FeedDemon fits the bill.
RSS has a lot of potential, the only thing we have to hope is that Microsoft is not allowed to “embrace and extend kill” the standard.
