rss

How long does it take you to sync your iPhone? I have the 16GB 3G, about 9GB of music, almost 2GB of apps, and about 60 photos. My "Other" category shows up as more than 2GB (!) in iTunes, but that might be worthy of a separate post. In any case, from start to finish, syncing my iPhone on my Windows PC (it's where my music library is) takes almost an hour. A lot of that time is spent backing up or transferring purchases, but it just doesn't seem right that it should take that long.

A … Read more

Newsgator pushes its popular RSS reader FeedDemon into release candidate status, introducing some new features and fixing bugs from the previous beta version.

The big news for FeedDemon 3 came with the fourth beta, which introduced Google Reader synchronization. That feature did not come without bugs, and continued to be refined through the beta development. Several fixes in the release candidate fix Google Reader synchronization bugs, including properly marking starred items as flagged in FeedDemon, syncing tags, and marking feeds disabled. Another big repair to FeedDemon's Google Reader behavior fixes an error that prevented users who had nonalphanumeric characters … Read more

Have you ever used an RSS newsreader? Though you can surf to your favorite sites using your Web browser of choice, RSS readers bring all the news to you in a simple format that's conducive to getting more information quickly. The best RSS readers make it easy to add your favorite sites so you can quickly sift through headlines. When you find something of interest, you can often expand the story in an RSS reader or go directly to the site to read more. If you spend a lot of time on the Web, RSS readers are a great … Read more

By Kristina Loring

With the Twittersphere reaching critical mass, lots of companies are establishing accounts to speak directly with customers, monitor their brand, and respond to questions and rumors. Most of them are using the microblogging service to become more transparent and as a trustworthy resource for their followers, while also exposing a more personable aspect of their brand.

Here are some examples, researched by Brilliant Ink, a communications agency specializing in strategic messaging and content development:

- Ford used Twitter to host conversations and answer criticisms during the recent federal loan hearings in DC: http://twitter.com/scottmonty. Scott … Read more

RSS aggregator FeedDemon and e-mail client Postbox both have released recent updates to their not-quite-ready for prime-time programs.

FeedDemon 3.0.0.20 beta 5a continues to build out the feature set of the popular RSS and Atom feed manager. FeedDemon 3 is shaping up to be a must-grab improvement on the last stable release, version 2.7.

FeedDemon 3 is able to synchronize feeds not only with FeedDemon's own Web site, NewsGator, for online news reading, but it can also talk to Google Reader. I jumped away from Google Reader because at the time it was sluggish and … Read more

Viigo has certainly matured since its early days. While it now grabs weather, financial news, flight status, and sports scores in addition to your news and blog feeds, it's still, at its core, the fastest, most complete RSS reader for BlackBerry. To users' eternal benefit, Viigo makes finding, subscribing to, and adding your own newsfeeds extremely simple with a long list of presets, browsable categories, and a way to add favorite RSS URLs, even from aggregators.

The extra channels to track the weather, flights, and stocks are bonuses, and a testament to the extensibility of Viigo's original engine. … Read more

Until native RSS-reading is perfected on mobile phones, third party newsreaders are often the quickest path to keeping up on headlines. Viigo has been our favorite for Windows Mobile phones to date, but the new application iBrowz beta provides a familiar widget paradigm for subscribing to feeds, and a sharp-looking reader.

Instead of assigning each subscription its own icon, iBrowz groups them by category--under news, tech, and sports thumbnails, for instance. You tap to view the bundle, tap again to see headlines for a news source, and tap a third time to open the story in iBrowz's glossy black … Read more

News junkies can rejoice over Magnesium: RSS Ticker 7. This unique download allows Web surfers to keep an eye on the news while doing almost anything.

This program comes to users in the form of a classic news ticker, a scrolling line of information that never stops. This one appears at the bottom of a user's screen and stays on top of all open items. A small line of text scrolls from right to left and details some of the biggest headlines around the world. Users can roll their mouse over a headline to get a description of the … Read more

IngBoo is a new service that aggregates RSS feeds and can track topics and keywords across multiple content sites. The service was pitched to me as a tracking tool, but it also serves double duty as a headline reader the likes of Netvibes and My Yahoo. It analyzes each feed to find out how fresh the information is, and will show you with a simple pie graph how often the latest stories came in. You can also preview some of the most recent headlines and click straight to them.

To create alerts you have to use its built-in search tool, … Read more