NewsGator buys syndication rival: Huh. Newsgator bought FeedDemon. I think these two are the best client-side (as opposed to Web-based) aggregators on the market right now — NewsGator is near-perfect integration into Outlook, and FeedDemon is IMHO the best standalone RSS client.

NewsGator plans to distribute Bradbury’s products, including FeedDemon and TopStyle, to its paid subscribers this summer for no additional charge. Nick Bradbury, the developer of both products, is expected to join NewsGator’s staff.

BTW, that NewsGator link from above was written two years ago, when I first discovered RSS. It’s interesting to read my first impressions of RSS again.

It struck me last night that there are two models of RSS aggregation: “real-time” and “stored” (yes, I just made those two terms up…).

Real-time are aggregators like Mozilla’s Sage extension. This model goes and gets the feed real time and displays it on-demand. In a lot of ways, they’re not even aggregators. They’re just different ways of looking at the content on your site — just like rearranging and simplifying the HTML version.

On the other hand, we have the stored aggregators. When this model refreshes the feed, it creates autonomous “objects” for each post. These objects are persistent beyond connection to the RSS feed. Additionally, you can manipulate the objects. For instance, with aggregators built into mail clients (like NewsGator and the awesome new RSS functioinality in Thunderbird), it’s very easy to just forward a post like an email.

(I thought about calling them “caching” instead of “stored,” but the term “cache” implies that it’s holding something for a set period of time for efficiency reasons. I don’t think that applies here.)

Now, this differentiation isn’t earth-shaking, except that the latter type of aggregator is essentially the same thing as someone visiting your site and hitting “Save page as…” and storing copies of your site on their machine.

This effectively circumvents the implicit advantage of a Web site in that it’s supposed to always contain the most up-to-date information. Users with a aggregator that stores posts can very easily be looking at an old copy of some content from your site.

For instance, I was opining about my newest TV obssession over at my fledging personal blog. I’m using WordPress over there (love it, incidentally), and it’s much easier (much, much easier) than Movable Type to keep working on something in draft. However, eventually I published the post and then kept right on editing — I made quite a few changes after it hit the site (and the feed) for the first time.

This morning, I get to work, and Thunderbird has a copy of the post that’s about three versions old. I look in Sage, and, of course, it’s the latest version.

It all comes down to how your aggregator handles modified posts. I know that NewsGator can be configured to download them new every time they change. But this ends up being kind of goofy because if someone like me keeps editing, you get a new post for every edit that the aggregator detects.

Other aggregators will just highlight an edited post as “unread” (the convention is to make it bold). Others (like Thunderbird, for instance), will apparently not do anything — the first version is the one they keep.

Like I said, this isn’t anything earth-shaking, but it’s worth keeping in mind. We tend to think of the Web as being a “they see what I have up there right now” affair. With RSS, this may or may not be true.

It’s raining free apps!

Picasa is a pretty terrific photo management software. Google just bought the company, and they’re giving Picasa away for free. My father-in-law just got a digital camera for his birthday, so I set him up with Picasa. Now he just plugs in the camera, and up pops picasa. It slurps off all the pictures on to the computer, and clears the camera card for the next use. All he has to do is name the album. He can also remove redeye, crop, enhance, print, email, and etc. The interface is extremely friendly. I use Photoshop Album at home, but if I didn’t have that, I’d use Picasa.

Microsoft snapped up Lookout, a search plugin for Outlook, and that’s in the free software bin now too. Lookout is a lightning-speed email search that relieves you from organizing your emails (like I ever did anyway). The speed on this thing is amazing. Did the designer mail me that photoshop? ‘attachment: psd’ Where was I meeting Deane for lunch? ‘lunch from: Deane’. What was the confirmation number for the flight? ‘flight’. Sort of like the Gmail search features, but for your desktop.

Why hasn’t Microsoft snapped up NewsGator? Newsgator paired with Lookout would be awesome. Instant search of every post from every blog you read. Maybe they have some larger RSS strategy in mind. After all, they’ve certainly noticed RSS.

Why Did We Invest in NewsGator?: Here’s a post from a venture capitalist about why he invested in NewsGator.

The misperception is that NewsGator is only an Outlook plug-in. While the most popular product from NewsGator is currently their Outlook-based aggregator, what really turned us on when we dug into NewsGator as a potential investment is NewsGator Online Services (NGOS).

Greg Reinacker’s vision is much broader than simply an RSS aggregator – his goal is to provide RSS content on any device. NewsGator currently provides clients for Outlook, the Web, POP email, mobile devices (web-based and wap), and Microsoft Media Center (how cool is it to get an RSS feed on your TV?).

He makes a good point — NewsGator has really extended past Outlook. They started with that, and the Outlook plug-in is what they’re most well-known for, but I just wrapped up 30 days with Newsgator Online Services (NOS), and I can tell you that they’ve deftly transcended the aggregator.

While working with NOS, I got the…feeling, that news and information was just out there, everywhere, and it was up to me how I wanted to receive it. They have options to push information to about any device, on any platform. I’ve never felt more saturated by news in my life than during those 30 days.

Information was everywhere — so much so that I stopped thinking in terms of this aggreagtor or that protocol. I was just swimming in information, and the method in which I chose to receive it was almost incidental. Petty, even.

Essentials : Mark Pilgrim has listed his “essential” software tools for doing his job. I always like to see these — the absolute, “can’t live without” tools of people who do the same work as me. As the risk of being self-indulgent, here’s mine:

Email: Thunderbird or Mozilla Mail via IMAP. I starting using IMAP a few weeks ago over POP, and I’ve been really happy with it. Having your Sent Items following you around is great. I actually paid for an account at Fusemail to aggregate my POP accounts.

Browsing: Firefox or Mozilla

Text Editing: EditPlus on Windows, Kate on Linux (though anything with syntax highlighting and integrated FTP will work — I’m not that picky). I’ve been using EditPlus for four years now, ever since Joe introduced me to it.

Simple Image Editing: Irfanview on Windows, though I’ll usually just crop and resize images in the Office Photo Editor. The Gimp on Linux (only because I haven’t tried anything else).

Complex Image Editing: I do very, very little of this, but I have a copy of Photoshop Elements lying around. I barely know how to use it. I really miss Microsoft Image Composer. I loved that program.

FTP: I usually only need to FTP out of my text editor, but I use WS_FTP otherwise. FTP is built into KDE, so I don’t need a separate app for Linux

RSS Aggregator: SharpReader on Windows. I still love NewsGator, but I abandoned Outlook and NewsGator was a casualty of that. I use Straw on Linux only because I haven’t really looked for anything else. I don’t care for Straw much.

Office Productivity: Microsoft Office, though I often write simple notes and memos in EditPlus. I care too little about this type of application to bother looking for anything else, though I really like OpenOffice.

Web Serving: Apache. There is no other.

Scripting / Programming: PHP. I use it for both Web programming and client scripting.

Database: MySQL on the server, Access on the desktop. I’m really looking for an excuse to try Filemaker (like I need an excuse…)

WYSIWYG Editing: I don’t do much of this, but I will confess to having a copy of FrontPage 2002 installed. (Gasp! Horrors!) For anything more than the simplest layouts, I get really frustrated with it. These days, I’m using Mozilla Editor more and more. It’s a deceptively competent little app.

Other: I like to have a good search and replace utility. I have an old copy of FunDuc Search and Replace that has served me well since about 1996. PowerGrep is very good too.

I have a copy of Groove for workgroup collaboration, and it’s great when it works. But I have sync issues with it that just drive me nuts. As near as I can tell, my copy at work has been fetching a shared space for three weeks now.

Webalizer is really good for Web log analysis once you get it configued just the way you want it.

Anyone else want to share? What do you have installed right now?

While I was hanging out at the hospital waiting for the new addition, I got to wondering if RSS has to be “pull” by definition. Could you “push” updates from a site to a client?

Say you have a notification client — a little app that sits on your desktop. You log into it, and it notifies the site that it’s waiting for notifications on port X. This inserts the IP and port number of the client in a table of connected clients on the Web server. When the site is updated, it runs through this table and pushes XML to the IPs and ports in the table.

This came up because the nurses would often sit back at the station and monitor patients from there. Now, I realized you wouldn’t do patient monitoring via blog, but say there was some event that happened on a site that was important enough to warrant more than the standard “poll-every-15-minutes” notifications. If you pushed the XML like I explain above, end users would get it in semi real-time.

If you used this in conjunction with NewsGator’s ability to format and display arbitrary data, you could really move any information around quite well.

In the end, it’s a cross between the “push” of email and the “pull” of RSS, I guess. Quite possibly pointless.

NewsGator Media Center Edition: Greg is such a bad a**. I’m jealous.

Yep, that’s a video stream from a RSS enclosure playing in the lower left corner. One more click of the remote, and it’s full screen. (And yes, it’s from Microsoft’s Channel 9 video feed)

The screencaps look great.

RSS extensions: The inventor of NewsGator shows us some of the really cool things you can do with it.

…you can define whatever extension you like, and NewsGator will be able to use it in one way of another. Let’s explore how this works, and what you can do…you can take any extension data and map it to a column in Outlook…NewsGator 2.0’s rendering engine now uses XSLT, and you can customize the transforms used to render the items. What’s more, any custom data is available to these transforms…so you could have a custom rendering based on this data by building a new stylesheet.

This could be huge for corporate applications — RSS could be a generalized reporting stream on anything, including any statistics necessary. Using Outlook VBA, you can even trigger client-side programs when posts are received, so there’s really no limit on where you could go with this.

Press Release – NewsGator Online Services…: I was one of the beta testers for Newsgator 2.0. I can finally vouch that it’s a stunning piece of work, since I’ve been under an NDA for the last two months.

In addition to launching NewsGator 2.0 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, NewsGator Technologies announced its new NewsGator Online Services offerings to users today.

If you have an RSS aggregator at work and home, and you get irritated at having to read everything twice, then this is your tool. It can sync two versions of itself via a central server. Plus, Newsgator Online Services offers Web-based RSS aggregation for when you’re on the road.

I use Thunderbird for email, but I still have Outlook open because I can’t give up Newsgator.

Aggregators that automatically download web pages: Some people have made the request that NewsGator download the “target” page of a blog posting so disconnected users can have the content too. Greg has a good discussion of the implications.

So we’re caught between doing what the publisher wants (driving a click-through), or doing what the user says they want (scrape the page). It’s a tough call – we don’t want to upset the publishers, as they’re the ones providing the content…

Given that Microsoft products appear to be full of security holes, more and more thought is being given to migrating to other platforms. However, this has problems of its own. Macs are expensive, and Linux isn’t quite ready as a desktop platform.

This leaves a lot of people in limbo — they need to minimize Windows security problems as much as they can without abandoning Windows entirely. There may be Windows-only applications they need, or they make have to connect to a Windows network, etc.

The question then, is, if you can’t leave Microsoft entirely, does leaving it in varying degrees help make you more secure?

I ask because I’m slowing leaving the Microsoft platform. It wasn’t explicitly planned, but every day, I find less and less use for Microsoft products. Currently, Firebird is my browser of choice, and Mozilla Mail is my email client. I still have to use Outlook for work, but I’m slowly migrating my users off the Exchange server and going to client-based SMTP accounts, so Outlook’s days are numbered (perversely, I may keep it around just for NewsGator).

I had been maintaining a Web site in FrontPage, but that’s not going to last either. I’m moving the site to a Linux server, and there are other, better options. I do image editing in IrfanView and Photoshop Elements, and MySQL is my server database platform. I still use Access for some things (very handy for printing reports from a linked SQL or MySQL server), but I’ve heard FileMaker is even better and I have a copy of Crystal Reports 7 sitting around that I can use.

We have a Windows network, but you can replace the domain controller with Linux. Samba will act as a PDC, and Suse has released a new version of Linux designed specifically to take the place of a Windows workgroup server.

So, back to my question. Say I move off Microsoft applications entirely, but I keep Windows XP Pro as my operating system. So, Windows still forms the walls of the house, but I’ve decorated it completely with non-Microsoft applications. Am I better off? Does the lack of Microsoft applications make me safer? Or does the existence of Windows as the underlying operating system make any extra security this would provide irrelevant?

One Way to Take Aggregators Mainstream: Some great thoughts about RSS aggregator adoption.

“I think some of this can come from libraries, much the way we teach internet classes now. I mean, seriously – who exactly do you think is going to introduce aggregators to the public at large? If there was an easy-to-use aggregator, subscribing to sites was easier, more sites provided RSS feeds, and we came up with a usable alternative to a button that says ‘XML,’ I can see where a library might pre-populate it with local feeds from the library itself along with other local, relevant agencies.”

In my mind, NewsGator would be the easiest aggregator to get adopted in the enterprise. Outlook is so native to companies, and it’s so easy to use, it’s a natural choice to introduce a new technology.

It’s time for applications to start running off of remote configuration files. By this, I mean have applications store their settings in a file they access via an HTTP call, instead of on the local file system.

Take NewsGator, for example. At the office, I add and remove subscriptions daily. Over the weekend, on my home computer, I’m suddenly confronted with the fact that none of the subscription changes are on this machine, and I’m going to have either remember to export the OPML file every Friday, or recreate the changes from memory. But what if NewsGator could simply run off an remote OPML file, so both my installations could get their list of subscriptions from a file on some server somewhere?

There are some issues here, obviously. HTTP is a read-only protocol, so there would need to either be some WebDav involved to let the app write to the config file, or it would need to FTP the write, and just use HTTP for the read. Either that, or an application would have to come with remote configuration support from the vendor — the vendor maintains the server which will store the configuration settings in a database or some other structure which responds to XML-RPC or some other protocol.

And what about difference between machines? If there’s a file path in the config file that’s specific to one machine, then the other machine can’t really use that, can it? So there would have to be two levels of settings: (1) those specific to the machine it’s running on, and (2) those global to the application.

Obviously, there are a lot of issues, but I think the concept is valid. Just needs some fine-tuning and the right situation.

RSS News Readers Browse for You: PC Mag reviewed aggregators. FeedDemon and NewsGator came out on top. Regarding NewsGator:

“Don’t underestimate the convenience factor here. With the other news readers, you have to open a separate application. Most business users will agree that having the news feeds directly in Outlook saves time. Also, bloggers should take a look at the plug-ins section of NewsGator’s Web site. If the blogging service you use is there, you’ll be able to use the related plug-in to post directly from NewsGator.”

I think it’s time to address content usability in RSS feeds. I subscribe to about 100 feeds, and I run through postings really quick, either hitting the Delete key (thanks Newsgator!) or the down arrow to move to the next item (when I’ve looked at them all, I go back to read what’s left).

Every once in a while, I stumble on something like this:

“romper bomper stomper boom
tell me, tell me, tell me do
magic mirror tell me today
did all my friends have fun at play?”

That was the entire entry. The title wasn’t any help either: “romper bomper stomper boom put away your vibrating broom.” Needless to say, entries like this hit me like a speed bump would at 150 m.p.h. Everything comes to a screeching halt.

What is this about? Do I care enough about it? Where do the links go? In most cases, I stop just long enough to hit Delete and move on.

This wasn’t an isolated case, either. I get several of these a day — entries that don’t have enough information in them to help decide if I actually want to read them or not. A lot of them just have a title and a link, and the titles of news articles are pretty ambiguous these days.

With RSS, this is more serious than with HTML. RSS content exists in much closer proximity to other content than HTML does. Your content is fighting for attention in a much smaller space.

With HTML, I’ve actually taken the time to visit your site so (1) I’ll probably look around a bit, and (2) there’s usually other information with the content to help me decide if I should care about it (comments, for instance). With RSS, you’re one tap of the delete key away from oblivion.

Upon further review, this entry turned out to be a collection of links to sites about the kids show “Romper Room.” That’s great and all, but couldn’t you have just told me that? Maybe just one little sentence at the end?

If you’re trying to be witty or something, that’s your call, but the usefulness of the content will suffer for it. If I wasn’t annoyed enough to write this entry, I never would have followed any of the links. I’ve got, like, 400 other entries to look at.

I’m not asking you to give me all your content in RSS, because I understand about ad impressions and all that. But at least give me enough information to decide if I want to investigate.

Here’s another rss feed to add to your favorite aggregator: Ebay2RSS. I couldn’t get the first option to work, but if you copy the search url from Ebay into the second part it will create an rss feed for the item you are searching for.

The url does get a bit long, but I was able to get it to work. Excellent if you use NewsGator or you frequently search for the same items. Enjoy.

Wired News: Aggregators Attack Info Overload: Wired has a good introduction to RSS for those that aren’t using it yet.

“Some even say the emergence of the aggregator is the best thing since a visual Web browser. ‘It’s going to subsume e-mail and subsume many forms of publicity,’ said Steve Gillmor, a technology columnist and blogger. ‘The problem with e-mail is trying to stop a fire hose of data with a thumb in a dike.’

As great as it is, it almost results in more information overload for me. I’m subscribed to more feeds than I can possibly read right now, although NewsGator lets me process them as efficiently as possible. What’s needed is better sorting capabilities, so it’s easier to cut the wheat from the chaff and get to stuff you’re really interested in.

I just pulled a log file for the last week and cranked up Webalizer. It took me 30 minutes or so to screen out all the spiders I could find and all IP addresses that might be someone associated with this site, but after finally getting some clean stats, the following two bits of information struck me as pretty cool:

1. Of all hits to a “front page,” 55% are to the HTML version, 45% to the RSS feed.
2. The Googlebot visits this site, on average, 180 times a day. AllTheWeb’s crawler, 150 times a day. Inktomi’s crawler (used by several companies), 105 times a day.

I push about 22MB per day out of this site. That’s just text — the site has no graphics to speak of. I found UserAgents for the following aggregators in order of frequency:

• AmphetaDesk
• Bloglines
• Awasu
• Radio Userland
• NetNewsWire
• FeedReader
• NewsGator
• FeedDemon

Those were only the ones I recognized. There are some goofy looking UserAgents in there, so I’m sure there are more. Note that Bloglines includes the number of people subscribed to your site in the UserAgent. Handy, but I got another Bloglines subscriber during the week, so the UserAgent changed from one day to another.

Are there any hard-and-fast rules about attribution in blogging? Blogs are essentially just links to other content sources, so if you find something via someone else’s blog, do you link to the link, or link to the target? Put another way, if you follow the link all the way back to the target, do you give credit to the blog whereby you found the first link? Or do you just link to the target and call it good?

I subscribe to a lot of blogs (thanks NewsGator), and via those subscriptions, I find a lot of stuff that ends up here. What do I “owe” the blogs that led me to the content?

The other day, I added a “via Anil Dash” link to one of my entries for no particular reason, and it got me thinking about it. If the content is A, and Anil Dash’s entry that links to it is B, then should I link to Anil as C? Or should I follow Anil’s link to the target and become a B? If I become a B via Anil’s link, do I need to add attributation to his B?

I found an item the other day that I thought was good, so I followed the link in it…to another blog entry, then another, then another. It took about five links to get back to the source (so, the original item I found was, like, a G or something). Do I provide attributation to G? F? Which one? Now, each link in the chain back to this item had commentary, so they all added value, but still, that’s a long way to go. It becomes a usability issue.

It’s much cleaner just to link to the target (especially if the link doesn’t really add anything to it), but is that fair? Should you give credit to the blog that led you there?

NewsGator – Downloads: NewsGator 1.3 is out with severaldozen changes, including NNTP support. This means you don’t have to use Outlook Express as a newsreader anymore since this builds it into Outlook and it inherits all the snazzy NewsGator functionality.

I was playing around with NewsMonster today, and in doing this, I stumbled upon an obvious difference between NewsGator and other aggregators. NewsGator creates an independent object in Outlook for each entry it gets off an RSS feed. The object (an Outlook post object) is no longer tied to the original RSS feed.

This struck me because people have talked in the past about objects “dropping off the RSS feed.” NewsGator has no concept of this, because once an object appears in a feed the first time, NewsGator spawns its own representation of it and doesn’t “need” the feed for anything anymore. So even after it drops off the feed, I still have the item in Outlook.

Do other aggregators work this way?

I’ve subscribed to a new RSS feed that’s injecting styles into posts — each post is surrounded by a FONT tag that makes the text Arial, instead of the default Times New Roman that Outlook (I use NewsGator) would render in if not for the tag.

I always felt that RSS allowed you to put forth content without context — pure content without an asthetic filter, so-to-speak. Styling feeds would seem to defeat that goal.

Should people style their RSS feeds? Should news aggregators give users the option to strip styles from posts when they’re displayed? What is too much style? If there’s an image with a post, it’s nice to let that wrap right or left as the author intended, but should you draw the line at font changes?

We unleashed our new search page over the weekend. To make it work correctly, we had to retroactively keyword all past entries (a endeavor about which I will write more later). but with that done, it seems to be working quite well.

The engine returns terms in two groups — (1) those in which the search term appears in the title or keywords (Best Bets), and (2) those in which the search term appears anywhere else (The Rest). The second group is de-duped, so items from Best Bets don’t show up in The Rest. Searches like RSS, ColdFusion, and NewsGator demonstrate that it works pretty well.

(In the process of “keywording” everything, we had to make some distinctions between what’s a category and what’s a keyword. I touched on the process in this entry, but in practice, it wasn’t so clear. We’re going to stick with the categories for grouping under a particular topic, and we limited keywords to proper nouns — protocol names, companies, software, etc.)

Finally, we wanted to use the full-text indexing capabilities of MySQL, but we’re on a hosted server and the minimum word length for this server is set to four characters. Thus, searches for three-letter acronyms like RSS, IBM, XML, SCO, AIX, etc. would return nothing. Consequently, the page uses a set of LIKE queries. We were concerned a bit about speed, but it’s vastly faster than the default Movable Type search, so that fear seems misplaced.

Try the new search out, and let us know what you think.

From the “Let’s Jump To Conclusions” Department — with my acquisition of Zempt, and my continued use of NewsGator, I can produce and consume content without ever using a browser. I get information in Outlook via NewsGator, and I can turn it around (or create it from scratch) in Zempt. I don’t have to look at anyone else’s Web site anymore unless I choose to. I don’t even have to look at my Web site anymore.

Where does this leave Web design? And graphic design? Chris and I have discussed redesigning Gadgetopia because it’s a little bland, but if most of our traffic comes via the RSS feed, why bother? How long before we just…forget that we even have an HTML-based Web site somewhere? How long before someone consciously decides to build a Web site…without the Web site, instead having their “site” exist as nothing but an RSS feed?

Interesting times.

NewsGator Case Study: Triple Point Technology: This is a great case study by the guys over at NewsGator about integrating blogs and RSS into the enterprise.

“Internal weblogs were created using Six Apart’s Movable Type. Internal authors are accustomed to sending email, but now post certain information to their new weblog instead; when they do, a permanent, searchable record exists of the information. ‘It’s a delicate balance between email and weblogs,’ says Allie, ‘but we’re getting better at it.’”

Back when I was in corporate IT, I tried setting up an NNTP (Usenet-ish) server for my project team, but it never took off. Our newsreader was Outlook Express, and that was disconnected enough from Outlook that the newsgroup just withered. I can’t help up think it would have been different with NewsGator.

NewsMonster: This is very well-done — a news aggregator built into Mozilla. It installs beautifully (completely within the browser), and seems to work like a charm. I’m still hooked on NewsGator, but the channels installed with NewsMonster by default are interesting enough that I’ll keep it installed just for fun.

This is also a great example of the programming that can be done inside Mozilla. My post yesterday about using Mozilla-equipped Linux machines as thin clients seems awfully smart in light of this. If you can do this for news aggregation, what could you do with Mozilla for, say, CRM?

Oddpost: Learn More: More competition for NewsGator. This is from the latest release of OddPost:

Oddpost’s integrated RSS client delivers all the latest news and blog entries straight to your mailbox. Receive posts from your favorite blogs moments after they’re published.

The Big Announcement: PopHeadlines 1.0.0.1 is here!: Newsgator has competition. We didn’t think it would take long

PopHeadlines is a RSS-to-POP3 gateway. This is immensely useful. It allows you to receive posts from various RSS feeds in exactly the same way you retrieve your email.

Chris threw down the gauntlet the other night by shilling for Awasu and claiming:

“The only thing I can see that NewsGator has on Awasu is the ability to see a consolidated view of all subscriptions, so I can can sort all new items by date regardless of where they came from. Otherwise, it’s fantastic.”

Well, after using NewsGator for a few weeks now, I’ve noticed three things that have become awfully handy and exist only because of the integration with Outlook:

Forwarding items. Since each item retrieved by NewsGator is a Post item in Outlook, it’s easy to just hit “Forward” and have the entire item captured in an email ready to forward to someone.

Categorizing items. You know how you drag emails around in Outlook to different folders? You can do the same thing with NewsGator. I have folders for “Reference,” “Read Later,” “Post On,” etc. When I see something I like and want to keep around, I just drag it to a folder.

AutoArchiving. Items in NewsGator are subject to Outlook’s Auto-Archive feature just like anything else, so I can archive all items after 24 hours, keeping the base news folder under control while leaving the stuff I’ve put in other folders.

There, beat that.

Deane mentioned with great pride that he’s cheap, but admitted he’d probably pay $29 for the RSS news aggregator, Newsgator. Not to be outdone on the cheap stakes, I attempted to find a free, quality news aggregator for my own use and ran into Awasu:

“Awasu is a free Windows news-reader that runs in the background on your computer and monitors these sites for you. When it sees that something new has appeared, it will let you know. Awasu will also keep track of what you have already read which saves you even more time since you no longer need to search through your favorite sites for new stories… And using its powerful plugin architecture, Awasu can easily be customized to monitor absolutely anything at all.”

The only thing I can see that NewsGator has on Awasu is the ability to see a consolidated view of all subscriptions, so I can can sort all new items by date regardless of where they came from. Otherwise, it’s fantastic.