As always when you get into something new, especially on the Internet, you find yourself being drawn into a new world and finding new things. It’s sort of like a chain reaction effect leading to an ‘explosion of knowledge’. Find out one thing and it leads to two others, which lead to four, to sixteen…
Yesterday I looked at FeedDemon, my first foray into RSS client software - yes I know the proper term is “desktop news aggregator” but wonder how long that term will last when RSS goes mainstream? Currently RSS usage, even though it is rapidly expanding, is still only a small percentage of Internet users.
Anyway, while getting familiar with FeedDemon and thinking how great it was, I utilised one its features called “Watch” which allows you specify a topic you are interested in, and as new documents come in via feeds you can see a summary of relevant information. I setup a watch on the topic “RSS” and from that read a blog posting from Scobleizer (he’s supposed to be the human face of Microsoft) about a product called Onfolio. I downloaded the beta 2 version from the Onfolio website and I have to say I agree with him - it’s impressive.
- It works inside your web browser (Firefox or IE), so you don’t have another application and user interface to have cluttering up your desktop. Also it uses the rendering engine of your browser and, in the case of Firefox only of course, gives you the security and anti-popup/anti-ads protection you have spent time building up in your browser.
- In the latest version there is support for Firefox which is a natural fit for RSS news feeds. In Onfolio (as in most RSS clients) you have a folder of grouped feeds on common topic - the view is called a ‘newspaper’. I open up a Firefox tab for each newspaper and can easily scan through the abstracts for each post, when I see something interesting I just press [Enter] to read.
- It has ‘Search Folders’ for defining searches on subjects. Define a simple or complex search and it looks through all (thousands) of abstracts in RSS feeds and shows you a ‘newspaper’ view of all topics. When a new item is downloaded via an RSS feed if it matches the search it goes automatically into the folder.
- It has other tools for finding, collating, filing and presenting information gathered from the Internet which I have yet to explore but which look equally powerful.
As a tool for helping to keep up with, and digest information, it’s definitely a step forward. It’s interesting to imagine how people will find ways to use it.
The funny thing is that the very software I used to find it, FeedDemon, then ends up being ousted.
