Another plug for RSS, and a great new tool
Like many of you, I suffer from "media overload". Too much news available to consume. Too little time to see it all, much less analyze it for the betterment of myself or my company.
RSS is a great simplifying tool, and now I've got two great products that let me plow through hundreds of targeted, relevant stories from about 120 pre-selected sources of my choosing.
The first tool I've used for over a year. On my Treo smartphone, I use Free News. FreeNews isn't free, alas, but it's worth every penny of the $20 I spend to subscribe every year. FreeNews is a fully-customizable RSS viewer. I can scan headlines and read entire stories quickly, even e-mail them to myself (for future viewing) or share them with others. It's built for one-handed operation (like all Treo/handheld programs should be). If you have a Treo, you need FreeNews.
The second RSS tool I love is new, and I use it on my PC at work and my laptop at home. It's called NetVibes, and it's built on the new Ajax wb-development platform. That means it's sleek, fast, easy to use, and very interactive. NetVibes allows you to customize your own Internet home page. It's the same scheme that "MyYahoo" and other portals have done for a long time, but with those old portals you had to select from a closed set of content choices. With NetVibes, it's built around RSS, and almost all news/information sites (and many blogs) publish RSS feeds today. NetVibes is free, and since it's not a standalone desktop application (but rather a web-app), it shouldn't be a problem for your IT folks. You can even put the latest YouTube videos on your NetVibes page.
Here's a quick look at how RSS headlines are displayed on NetVibes. Click the photo to see a larger screen-grab of my NetVibes home page.
RSS is a great simplifying tool, and now I've got two great products that let me plow through hundreds of targeted, relevant stories from about 120 pre-selected sources of my choosing.
The first tool I've used for over a year. On my Treo smartphone, I use Free News. FreeNews isn't free, alas, but it's worth every penny of the $20 I spend to subscribe every year. FreeNews is a fully-customizable RSS viewer. I can scan headlines and read entire stories quickly, even e-mail them to myself (for future viewing) or share them with others. It's built for one-handed operation (like all Treo/handheld programs should be). If you have a Treo, you need FreeNews.
The second RSS tool I love is new, and I use it on my PC at work and my laptop at home. It's called NetVibes, and it's built on the new Ajax wb-development platform. That means it's sleek, fast, easy to use, and very interactive. NetVibes allows you to customize your own Internet home page. It's the same scheme that "MyYahoo" and other portals have done for a long time, but with those old portals you had to select from a closed set of content choices. With NetVibes, it's built around RSS, and almost all news/information sites (and many blogs) publish RSS feeds today. NetVibes is free, and since it's not a standalone desktop application (but rather a web-app), it shouldn't be a problem for your IT folks. You can even put the latest YouTube videos on your NetVibes page.
Here's a quick look at how RSS headlines are displayed on NetVibes. Click the photo to see a larger screen-grab of my NetVibes home page.
posted by Chip Mahaney at 9:57 AM
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