For many, a daily trip to one’s favorite blogs is part of life like a cup of coffee or… reading the morning newspaper. But, did you know you can use newsreaders to more efficiently read many blogs - including ContextWeb’s - in one place?

The newsreader, as Wikipedia points out, could mean one of three things: news client (old school Usenet reader), news presenter (Charles Gibson on ABC, for example) or aggregator.

We’ll concentrate on ‘aggregator,’ which allows you to customize your blog reading experience by entering RSS feeds from your favorite blogs and then accessing them from one location.

Popular newsreaders for aggregation include:

1. Bloglines - Founded by Mark Fletcher in 2003, Bloglines was groundbreaking at the time and is still a favorite of many (including Jason Calacanis) and allows you to not only track blogs but create one, too.

2. Newsgator - The self-proclaimed “world’s leading RSS platform company” has a free online application that allows blog readers to “search [for], subscribe and synchronize” to their favorite feeds. The folks at Newsgator are rapidly expanding the platform for RSS viewing with their recent announcement regarding Blackberry coverage.

3. MyYahoo - This venerable aggregator has been around for a few years and allows you to subscribe to feeds in addition to bringing in many other Yahoo! features such as stock quotes and email. As reported by ReadWriteWeb, it just received a Web 2.0 makeover.

4 . Google Reader - This reader can be integrated into the personalized home page and provides many of the same features of MyYahoo plus integrated widgets which allow users to embed everything from a weather widget to a game of Bejeweled in their newsreading experience. Mac OS X users can even port a widget to the OS X dashboard.

5. Technorati - This technology news aggregator allows you to create watchlists in addition to tracking the most popular news, tags, searches and top bloggers list which includes BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Lifehacker and 43 Folders.

6. Sage - I’ve used this one quite a bit. Sage is integrated into the Firefox browser and allows for easy subscribe and unsubscribe. It is supported by a vibrant user and Firefox plug-in publisher community and is constantly updated.

7. Flock - This aggregation company has taken newsreading to the next level by creating an entirely new, multi-platform browser. Congratulations to Bart Decrem, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young. Flock integrates with Firefox and, according to Kyle Eslick’s review, adds built-in functionality to social media tools such as del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and others. Latest updates are available via the Flock blog.

8. Megite - This is an RSS aggregator along the lines of TechMeme and others that keeps its digital fingers on the pulse of the blogosphere and tells users what the hot topics of the ‘moment’ are.  Uniquely, Megite will take your OPML file that contains your favorite feeds and  create a custom web page for you to view your feeds on Megite as  it has done here for ContextWeb.

9. Internet Explorer - No list would be complete without whatever Bill Gates and Microsoft is doing… they are late to the game, one of many late entries, but with new IE7, the newsreader is built-in to almost any new Windows computer that you buy. Pajama Market has a nice overview here on IE7 and other readers capabilities. Not everyone is happy with IE 7’s RSS capabilities, though.

This is just a short list of what you can use to bring all of your feeds together. The open source development community is always producing new apps - as is the commercial world. Stay tuned - and add the ContextWeb blog to your newsreader, if you feel so inclined.

Tags: bloglines, technorati, wikipedia, flock, newsgator, sage

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 3:37 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.