klyjen.blog

News aggregators are (in my not so humble opinion that I shared freely on the list-serves last week) a "best of both worlds" approach to managing the knowledge you get from websites of all varieties. Conceptually, news aggregators help users (like me!) manage the web. I have no interest in e-mail newsletters, for the most part, because they clutter my inbox, my blackberry, and come to me at their own schedules whether or not I'm interested in seeing them at any given point. Historically, many websites offered a "subscribe to be notified when items change on this site!" option, which was great for what it was worth, but generally unmanageable. Those sorts of newsletters are "pushing" information to you, whether you want it or not; the "unsubscribe" option has become as complex as "quitting the gym." Also, the owners would sell or share my e-mail address, and the last thing I need is more unsolicited mail. (Another downside...having my information delivery tied to my e-mail address generated havok when that e-mail address changed.)

On the flip side, if you have 15, 50, 150, or 500 websites you want to follow, visiting all of those pages daily to check and see if they had been updated would be equally unmanageable, and if you skipped a week, you'd miss information. That sort of "pull" technology for information was clunky as well, and you waste valuable time visiting pages that have not been updated.

Here is the best of both worlds part....with my aggregator, I can subscribe to a site, but I do not have to provide the site manager with my e-mail address. I don't have to visit the sites to see what is new, and I'm not giving out my e-mail address in exchange for the privilege of receiving notifications. For many feeds, I can read the content right from my aggregator, which is faster than visiting the site and allows me to get updated while I'm not connected to the web. And when I'm done, I'm done--no need to notify the owner of the site or jump through hoops to unsubscribe. Instead, I simply delete the feed.

I like NewsGator in particular for a variety of reasons. I can categorize and organize my feeds, allowing to me "catch up" on the most relevant information while leaving other posts for "when I have time." I am just beginning to play with the cross-section of NewsGator and the new Search Folders in Outlook 2003, but the potential for granularity is mind-boggling. Feeding the information into Outlook, especially in law firms, provides the posts in a format that attorneys are familiar with, and training becomes a non-issue. For many attorneys, the concept of news aggregation would be enough of a hurdle; throwing in a new, seemingly-complicated interface at the same time might turn them off of the concept entirely.