Webware

Start your day out every morning by reading your favorite financial feeds? You might like Streetread, a relatively simple feed aggregator that pulls in stories from major financial publications. It also grabs live quotes from your favorite ticker symbols.

While you could accomplish a similar feat with services like Alltop, Original Signal, and Netvibes, Streetread's claim to fame is that it's constantly updating and will keep the page alive and scolling downwards as new stories pop up. You can preview each headline before you click, or just click it without getting lost--it'll simply jump you off site while retaining a link on the top of the page to hop back to Streetread.

I found the browsing experience on Streetread to be enjoyable, albeit less productive than subscribing to these feeds via Google Reader or any other feed grabber. The idea of a scrolling page of links lends itself very well to something like the iPhone, so I'd be interested to see this ported over as a native application that could put all of this information together into tabs or sections of the screen that could be accessed with finger swipes.

Read your favorite financial stories as they happen and keep track of stocks with Streetread.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

NewsGator converted its popular RSS feed aggregation clients to freeware in January 2008, and now that seed has borne fruit: recommended fruit, to be precise.

NewsGator's new Recommended Stories filter introduces users to stories and feeds they aren't already subscribed to, but might like.

(Credit: NewsGator)

Partnering with SenseArray, a collaborative filter from Uprizer Labs, NewsGator now offers live RSS feed recommendations from feeds that the user hasn't already subscribed to. Currently available only on the online NewsGator client, the filter pulls information from NewsGator as well as its sibling desktop clients, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac so that users who synchronize their RSS data will be contributing to the list of recommendations.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator's vice president of products, compared the process to more common Web-based ratings systems. "It takes attention from the client or online site, just like your rating on Amazon, but you're rating it with attention." That attention, he said, comes from marking a post as read--essentially telling the filter that you like it. If enough people do that and the post matches your interest, it might be suggested to you as news you'd like but haven't seen yet.

Kellner said that NewsGator will be making two kinds of recommendations. The first, a general news category, is "wide-open," as he puts it, but limited to posts from the past two days. The second is narrowed down to categories, such as entertainment or sports, and more heavily utilizes the SenseArray filters. These more specific recommendations are limited to not more than a week old, and should be adjustable to the tastes of the user.

The challenge, Kellner added, was how to recommend current stories that users aren't already getting. "We pull in six million events per week that we think are relevant." But the system won't be perfect initially. "Over time, we'll see what adjustments we need to make."

NewsGator does have plans to push the recommendations feature out to its desktop clients, but there isn't a timeline for that, yet.

Checking Web sites by typing in the URL feels like firing up a rickety 56k baud modem and logging on to CompuServe. It gets the job done, but really should only be used under extreme duress or nostalgia. Syndicated feeds bring the Web site to you, and when NewsGator made all its RSS clients free on Wednesday, they suddenly made a top-notch suite with tools for Windows, Mac, mobile, the Web, a podcast manager, and a Microsoft Outlook extension incredibly appealing. And by appealing, I mean you might not be able to imagine feeds the same way afterwards. It's that good.

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What is Google Reader and why should you use it?

Google Reader is a free, Web-based reader for RSS feeds. You can find feeds on nearly every Web site. RSS feeds offer a simplified view of Web content down to just text, pictures and videos--minus the site's style and formatting, which can sometimes hinder or befuddle casual reading.

Google reader lets you subscribe to these feeds as easily as typing them into your browser's address bar, and lets you read them like you're browsing through e-mail. There are many online RSS readers available, but Google is one of the best. It's easy to get a grip on Google Reader basics, but there are several tips and tricks that can make it extremely productive.

Setup: Finding RSS Feeds



As mentioned earlier, nearly every site has an RSS feed, and you can usually find it by scrolling around and hunting for the little RSS logo (a little orange box with three white waves). What makes Google Reader particularly useful is that it can take any old Web site URL and find the RSS feed on its own. If you don't quite remember the name of the site, or the exact URL, Google Reader has a built in directory you can search by keyword. There's also a neat feature called "bundles" that has over a dozen themed groups of preselected feeds you can subscribe to at once. Adding one of these bundles organizes the newly subscribed feeds into a handy folder.

Organizing

Once you get going with Google Reader, you'll likely have a bunch of sites that need organizing into groups. The easiest tool to handle this is folders. To begin this process, just click on manage subscriptions in the lower left-hand corner of Google Reader's main page. This will take you to an options menu where you can create and delete folders and feeds, as well as quickly categorize the feeds you have into folders.


To swap folders quickly, use the drop-down menus.
(Credit: CNET Networks)

To change or make a new folder, there's a drop-down menu on the far right side of each feed. To make a new folder, click on it, and pick the New Folder option. After naming it, the feed you clicked on in the first place will automatically be sorted into this folder. Once you've created a folder, you can quickly add several feeds by clicking the drop-down button on the far right to change folders.

Seasoned Gmail users might be familiar with "starring" and labeling, Google's simplified version of managing feeds and stories instead of folders. Google Reader is no different, letting you star or tag posts with labels for quick sorting later on. There are two ways to star a story--either click on the star icon on the top left of a story, or add star option on the bottom left. To read through just starred items, pick the starred items feed on the top left menu.

Labeling is a slightly more complicated affair, but a powerful tool to swap through genres of feeds with just a few keystrokes. Like stars, you can tag any feed item on the fly by clicking the edit tags button on the lower right hand side of the story. You'll notice right away the story has automatically been tagged with its parent folder. To actually search through tags, you'll have to use a simple keyboard shortcut by pressing G followed by T. This will pull up an overlay that lets you sort through stories by tag using your keyboard arrows. We'll get into more depth on keyboard shortcuts in the advanced tidbits section below.

Continue reading to learn how to read and share feeds, along with some advanced tidbits for taking your reading to the next level.

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