Aggregators not aggravators!

Aggregators: Getting What You Ask For

For those of you that spend entirely too much time searching for online news that matters to you, consider using an aggregator to get the latest on…well…just about anything. Aggregators do not simply list headlines; they collect news that caters to YOU, like a personal newspaper—or even better, like waking up to your favorite correspondent who says, “Good morning! Here’s the news you asked for.”

According to the popular free Web encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org, aggregators (or news aggregators) are a type of computer program that collects syndicated Web content, such as RSS and other XML feeds from weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites. Don’t know what the afore-mentioned are? No problem. Aggregators filter them looking for the news you want.

First, many Internet users made the transition from print news to online news in an effort to combine energies and conserve time. Now the overburdened and overwhelmed turn to these search tools to cut out yet another step of the daunting process. Where to start, you might ask? Take a look at Yahoo! News and Topix.net.

Yahoo! News http://news.yahoo.com/
Any avid Internet user has heard of Yahoo! It’s reliable and notable. Yahoo! News http://news.yahoo.com/ is extremely user-friendly and provides headlines on subjects in the following categories: top stories, most popular, world, US National, politics, business, science, technology, health, entertainment, sports, opinion, and even odd news. The homepage can be customized by changing the layout or adding or removing these news categories. The reader can save time if he or she chooses by clicking on the most viewed/emailed or most recommended stories.

Aside from choosing content and customizing the homepage, the reader can do a basic search for news or conduct an advanced Web search. The search results page is based on the look and feel of the standard front page of Yahoo! The reader can easily toggle through general and targeted results as well as view “breadcrumbs,” which show where a story was found. Yahoo! News crawls over 7,000 news sources in 35 languages and provides access to archived articles via Reuters and the Associated Press. These archives are stored for two weeks; some other sources are stored for varying lengths of time, anywhere from seven days to one month. Additional archives can be purchased as part of Yahoo! News Premium from $1.50-2.50 per article.

For confident searchers, Yahoo! offers advanced search options; the reader can limit results by exact phrases, update, site or domain, file format, filtered, location, language, or subscription.

Topix.net http://www.topix.net/
Another useful, but not as well known aggregator, is Topix.net http://www.topix.net/. The fact that the average surfer may be unaware of Topix is surprising because it is the largest news site on the Internet. If you like living on the wild side or would simply like a break from the same old searching routine, try Topix. The interface is user-friendly though a bit “busier” than that of Yahoo! It offers many of the same news features and additional subcategories including arts, autos, business, companies, medication, food, gadgets, hobbies, and law—just to name some. The list seems endless, with up to 300,000 topics available. Top stories cover the page, but the news can be searched by zip code, city, or subject. Advanced search methods include time range, source (for example: CNN, Newsday, Fox Sports, etc.), category, or location.

For the Internet savvy, Topix offers free news feed to other webmasters as well as commercial news feeds for a subscription fee (price dependent on customization). The top nine headlines from any Topix page are available for those who prefer to read their news via RSS.

There is really no downside to using news aggregators. You subscribe and view at your leisure; you unsubscribe when you choose. Whether it’s Yahoo!, Topix.net, or one of the many others, take the plunge! Let go of some of that burden! Let aggregators do the work for you.