OJR article: News That Comes to You

RSS feeds offer info-warriors a way to take the pulse of hundreds of sites
J.D. Lasica, OJR Senior Editor
posted: 2003-01-23 • modified: 2003-02-04

The explosion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a problem for any info-warrior: Who the heck has time to read all this stuff?

Ehud Lamm, a professor at the Open University of Israel, subscribes to 120 feeds and checks his news aggregator three to five times a day. He cherry-picks from a variety of feeds: foreign news (International Herald Tribune, BBC), bloggers (InstaPundit, Scripting News), obscure sites like Snowdeal.org, and sites that plumb niche subjects like linguistics and sociology.

Roger Turner, a freelance software developer in London who inspects his 218 news feeds five to 10 times a day, agrees. "Using a news aggregator has transformed the way I interact with the Web. News comes to me, on my terms. I feel in touch with 10 to 100 times as many sites as before RSS, with less effort."

Bowman, a freelance journalist and designer, makes two predictions: "I think that RSS feeds will start replacing e-mail newsletters because they do a better job of providing structure and a more efficient means of parsing through data." And he sees revenue possibilities here. "RSS could be a great way of distributing and reading classified ad information, customized to the user's preferences. If news media don't do this soon, eBay and Monster will."

To reach truly large numbers of users, news readers will need to become integrated with other applications. Michael Krus, a Parisian who started NewsIsFree three years ago with a colleague in Switzerland because he grew tired of surfing to the same sites every day, says he thinks tying news readers to a Web browser, e-mail program or instant messaging program is the next logical step. "That would be a killer app," he says.