THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND VALUES
by Lenny Chernoff <Lenny@learningtips4u.com>
.01 Time Is The Currency Of The Workplace
.02 News Aggregators
.03 Newzcrawler
.04 Yellow Brick Road
.05 Extra Features
.06 Summary
.07 Must See URLS
.01 Time Is The Currency Of The Workplace (return to index)
How many web sites, or news groups do you read each week? Is the answer too many or not enough to keep up with your information needs? In a typical week these are just a few of the sites that I monitor for my writing and research.
You might be surprised that these five web resources deliver thousands of links per week. You also might be surprised that I never go directly to these sites but to Newzcrawler, my favorite News Aggregator and never waste my valuable time looking for links that are of no interest to me.
.02 News Aggregators (return to index)
A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several mark-up language formats, finds the new information, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page." You can set the search parameters of your newsreader to go out and search by minutes, hours, days, or whatever time frame is comfortable to your work habits. At the end of this article I will include a listing of different News Aggregators resources, but for the purpose of this article I will concentrate on Newzcrawler.
.03 Newzcrawler (return to index)
There are many fine News Aggregators on the Net. After weeks of research this is the one that works best for me. The MSRP is $24.95 and there is a discount for educational, non-profits and network licenses. Newzcrawler only works on Windows machines. I will list some Mac based news aggregators at the end of this article.
Newzcrawler does have a longer learning curve than most programs but the power and timesavings is really worth the effort.
.04 Yellow Brick Road (return to index)
You create as many new channels as needed in Newzcrawler. You have a choice of three types of channels (Web Pages, Newsgroups and RSS Feeds). RSS (Rich Site Summary) is an XML format for syndicating Web content. Newzcrawler includes a list of databases that you can search for specific RSS feeds. This is a very powerful feature. For example, I want to find wine news feeds in the OCS (Open Content Syndicated) directory. I choose "News Is Free" as my OCS source and then choose "wine" and the Wine Spectator Magazine RSS feed comes up. Ok, here comes the really good news. I'm doing research on the increasing popularity of white wine. Each time I open Newzcrawler my Wine Spectator Feed and all my other feeds automatically updates and brings in the day's news. I go to the search feature of Newzcrawler and enter "white wine." I then know if I should look at any of my web sites or go on to my next task. If an article on white wine does appear I can bring up the web site in the Newzcrawler window or open another window in a new web browser. Newzcrawler can automatically e-mail that page or can create an HTML newsletter of a combination of searches to e-mail to a colleague.
Newzcrawler has a myriad of other useful features that save you valuable time. For example, when I launch Newzcrawler all my channels are automatically updated. You can use sound and visual cues to notify you when new stories, web pages, or feeds have arrived. You can keep Newzcrawler open on you desktop and automatically look for new RSS feeds. Newzcrawler can automatically create a news ticker if you want an additional way of being notified. I found that feature a bit distracting. There is a synchronizing tool to update and create a file to read while offline. There is an audio capability for the hearing impaired and an e-mail capability to forward your new finds. My favorite feature was the ability to take arriving news, make comments and post it to my personal blog within Newzcrawler.
.05 Extra Features (return to index)
Each feed contains personal programming possibilities. For example I can have my Wine Spectator news updated every three hours but have my Digital Photography Review updated every 48 hours. If my news feed has a login and password, then Newzcrawler will automatically enter that information at the appropriate time. You may want only headlines delivered or you may prefer the headlines and news content format. In either case Newzcrawler delivers the news the way you request. A "news balloon" can be created so I can quickly see the new stories and choose to read or store for another time. A server log can also be created to see if your news source is reliable. I found using the log feature that one news source was unreliable. Their sever was inconsistently delivering the news. I deleted that source to free up valuable searching time.
.06 Summary (return to index)
There are many compelling web sites and news feeds on the Internet but unfortunately there is so much noise that we often forget or can't find new information or updates to these sites. Newzcrawler is a software tool that aggregates news, websites, RSS feeds and brings the results to you in an easy to use searchable and sharing format.
.07 Must See URLS (return to index)
News That Comes To You – USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review
MAC News Aggregators – Ranchero
Mac And PC Aggregators – Amphetadesk
New Media Musings – Superb Journalism Feed
Bloggers Who Use News Aggregators – Valuable insights on how others use News Aggregators
World Press Review Online RSS Feed Source
Ryan Johnson - The Changing Nature of Scholarly Publishing and the...
Lenny Charnoff - News Aggregators - Automatically Delivered News
Kevin Kawamoto - Teaching Students About CyberHealth Information
Mark Szymanski - The Beaumont Foundation of America
Keith Devlin's The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved...
Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Kenichi Ohmae's The Invisible Continent. The Strategic Imperatives of...
The Internet, R&D, and U.S. policy in the Taiwan Straits. Part I of II