RssAggregator

Key mechanism behind the BlogWeb.

Single-user aggregators (aka Rss Reader)

• Radio Userland

• Net NewsWire

• PeerKat

• SlashDot lets the user define slashboxes, which use RSS. (This was the original style of usage, at netscape.com.)

• Abbe Normal:Rss Readers; also blogspace has a shorter list

• Open Source Python-based?

  • URSSus http://code.google.com/p/urssus/ - PyQt (includes some Twitter support?)

  • Straw (GNOME) (Oct'2010 - no action since pre-2009)

• Fever: PHP/MySQL, but for single user. http://feedafever.com/

  • http://anthonydrendel.com/blog/2012/9/5/why-and-how-i-use-fever.html

• there are some scalability issues associated with the growing use of personal aggregators - see Publish And Subscribe.

Web-based aggregators

• Google Reader

• Blog Lines

Niche-feed-set Portal aggregator - RSS Republisher

• OReilly MeerKat uses RSS

RSS update-trackers - tell you which feeds have been refreshed, so you can go scrape them

• WeblogsCom: doesn't really handle RSS, just "pings" from blogs - it keeps track of when blogs have been updated.

  • BloGs provides a personalized listing service based on the data from WeblogsCom.

Meme Tracker-s (in some sense these don't belong here, but they seem potentially competitive, so worth keeping together)

An interesting "question" is whether one "should" read someone's blog just in the reader's RssAggregator, or whether he should see items that interest him and jump to the source blog to read there?

• Victor Lombardi whines effectively about why going-to-the-source is better.

Conversely, "should" bloggers include entire entries in their RSS, or just enough to let the aggregator-reader decide whether he wants to click through?

• even if you as a writer want people to come to your blog to read, maybe you should send the entire contents so that their increasingly-intelligent Universal Inbox could apply some filtering rules based on the content.

  • I seem to recall somebody (Jon Udell?) noting an idea where an RSS channel would include attributes defining whether an aggregator should display certain fields - so you might send the full feed but a well-behaved aggregator would only use the data as you requests. What do you do about poorly-behaved aggregators? Block them with robots.txt? What if they are too poorly-behaved to follow that? (See Mark Pilgrim's experience with Newsmonster.)

• I also seem to recall Jon Udell talking about publishing multiple RSS feeds, some with full contents and others without.

  • I suppose you could publicly provide a link to the terse version, and pass the URL of the verbose version only to friends. But as people automatically publish their sub list to their Blog Roll, the verbose URL would leak out.