Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

RSS Feed Feed — Ultimate News Portal?

Posted by kdawson on Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:35 PM
from the rss-in-a-hall-of-mirrors dept.
Links
Rod Peterson writes, "I came across SiliconNews.net, a news portal that pulls RSS feeds from many of the top computer enthusiast, gaming, and nerd websites. Obviously, they've included Slashdot! They have an RSS feed of everyone else's RSS feeds, so you always have all the news."
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

RSS Feed Feed — Ultimate News Portal? 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Just what the world needs. (Score:4, Funny)

    by techno-vampire (666512) on Saturday September 16 2006, @11:41PM (#16123205) Homepage
    This sounds like just what the world needs: an easier way to become so indunated with news that you never have time for anything else.

  • My Google start page ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nead (258866) on Saturday September 16 2006, @11:42PM (#16123213) Homepage
    ... has better sources, a more appealing layout and no advertising.

    Thanks for comin' out.

  • FOTM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by achacha (139424) on Saturday September 16 2006, @11:43PM (#16123219) Homepage
    This is the flavor of the moment, there are a bunch of there floating around. RSS aggregators are all the rage now. I don't see why someone would want a slow site to maintain them when you can just create a folder of LiveBookmarks in Firefox and get all the aggregation you need. For more dedicated aggregation there is Thunderbird and lots of native clients with lots of features.

    I am sure there is a use for these, but this feels like the .com boom time, money put into ideas with questionable innovations and no viable way to profit. These companies then patent all the prior art around and horribly retard the innovation process of the space. Oh well, it's bound to happen, the clueless always feel their idea is new and unique and patentable.
    • As I scroll down from your post, you can see its true. Everyone has their little XML::RSS factory humming along griding off the same feeds ... oh Ajax too.

      But as of yet your right, there isn't a need for google.com/ig (or someone else) to do all this for me. But I think most people really like that 'start/home page'. I wonder how many people still have http://www.apple.com/startpage [apple.com] or whatever the oem is for their homepage. If that number is big, then switching that page to google.com/ig (they might lack a

    • I use http://www.bloglines.com/ [bloglines.com], and have been for a while now. I pull in stuff from all sorts of differnt sources, into one page. Yep, same thing that you can do with Firefox.

      But - I can access Bloglines anywhere, on any machine, and I have access to my already customized list of news feeds and the stuff that I've marked for further reading later, etc. For some reason I keep finding myself needing the ability to access my stuff from multiple machines, so it works great for me. Especially nice since m

    • One single reason. Accessing the same reader from multiple locations: home, office, PDA.
      Keep your RSS feeds in Firefox and I guarantee that as the list of feeds grows you won't be able to remember which articles you have and have no read. A lot of the online readers are too damn slow and don't support all the features I want. That's why I use MonkeyChow [monkeychow.org]. Tons of features, keeps articles around as long as I want, and open source PHP.

  • Original Signal is better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bstadil (7110) on Saturday September 16 2006, @11:43PM (#16123221) Homepage
    Have a look at OriginalSignal [originalsignal.com] same system but Ajaxified as you can just hover over a story to read a summary.
  • This would be one. Since it's a slashvertisement article, i'm gonna join in the slashvertising fun. Click Here [205.188.215.229] if you have winamp, watch some hot karaoke action on my live video stream from the 7 Bamboo karaoke lounge in San Jose California.

  • hmmm.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by macadamia_harold (947445) on Saturday September 16 2006, @11:46PM (#16123231) Homepage
    This is just like popurls.com [popurls.com], only not as good.

  • There is another website? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sporkme (983186) * on Saturday September 16 2006, @11:48PM (#16123239) Homepage
    I thought that Slashdot was the only website on the interweb tubes.

    The site seems to provide too much information in too small of a space. I choose to visit a website based on what I feel like seeing at the moment. While a clear effort is made to categorize articles and news, the site lacks direction and provides little to no new information. What you want is lost in the static. Many of the covered websites will have dupes and when big news happens, I can see that RSS feed being completely filled with the same news.

    I think the point is being missed about the value of RSS and what has been accomplished. Websites of this type are no longer necessary because we get to choose our own sources, layout and priority for news. Google's home page service has more value than this RSS feed compilation website.

    This feels like a shameless plug or a blatent ad.
  • I like using RSS to monitor websites that are infrequently updated. Or as one wag recently said, RSS stands for "Rarely Seen Websites".
  • When more of these type of programs are available, Slashdot will list them all, and will become an RSS Feed Feed Feed.

  • Not interested until somebody figures out a way to unduplicate articles, and where the article is some blog regurgitating some other source, track back to the original source and give you that.

  • What exactly is newsworthy about an agregator site? "Planet" sites are nothing new. How is this news?

    Personally, I use Akregator, KDE's RSS reader, to pull in just the feeds I want anyway. (Yes, Slashdot is one of them. :-) ) So I get all my news pushed to me, I can read it whenever, and I don't need a 3rd party site to do it. You can do the same with a dozen services or applications.

    Again, what's so interesting here? (And yes, I did glance at the site. I still don't get it.)

  • speaking of RSS feeds... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...it's great that Slashdot has one, and it's great that you guys started using em dashes a lot (like in the subject of this very article), but — isn't a valid RDF/RSS or XML character entity [feedvalidator.org]. So it shows up literally as "—" in feed readers.

    Use the numerical equivalent (—) instead, gracefully degrade it to "--", or simply include it as an unescaped multibyte character (yay UTF-8). But do something, it looks dumb.

  • Google Tabbed Homepage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Temujin_12 (832986) on Sunday September 17 2006, @12:48AM (#16123389)
    I love the new tabbed personalized homepage feature Google has added. Now, when I go to Google (which is about 12,324 times a day) I get a quick snap shot of the information I commonly go to from RSS feeds I choose. They also have lots of nice little tools/games you can drag onto your homepage as well.

    Now when I want to do what I call "the rounds" and check what's new in the world and on sites I'm interested in, I just look at the links from the various RSS feeds on one tab, middle click on ones I'm interested in, go to the next tab, and do the same. At the end, I have around 1-2 dozen tabs open and whole process only takes about 1-2 minutes and I have all the latest information on the topics I care about. This is what RSS feeds are about. Fast and intuitive access to the data you want, when you want it.
  • You just created an infinite loop between the Slashdot front page and theirs. RUN!

  • Similar sites (Score:5, Informative)

    by hpcanswers (960441) on Sunday September 17 2006, @01:38AM (#16123517)
    There are plenty of other sites just like this. There's popurls [popurls.com], which lists feeds from user-contributed sites like Slashdot along with more formalized sites like Google and Yahoo News. There's Diggdot.us [diggdot.us], for Digg, Slashdot, and del.icio.us. There is Xtreme News [www.xna.us], which includes Fark and the BBC. And then there is DiggLicious [digglicious.com], which has live views of updates from a couple of obvious sites.
  • What I don't get about RSS is that it doesn't seem to be any better than, say, just setting up the sites I want to get news from on a bookmark folder in Firefox and middle clicking to open them all in new tabs.

    Actually, tabs might be better since you usually get article summaries on most sites, rather than just headlines. And in the end, you probably need a browser to read the stories anyway. AdBlock cleans the page up for you too.

    Seriously, why is RSS better? For mobile phones? Do I want to read news on a tiny screen? Maybe if I commuted by public transport, but it's impossible where I live unfortunately.
    • yeah. I don't get it either. I have news and webcomics folders in my bookmarks, and I open the group as tabs each day.

      Then again, I never understood why people thought they wanted stuff emailed to them each day. Doesn't seem at all convenient to me.

    • What I don't get about RSS is that it doesn't seem to be any better than, say, just setting up the sites I want to get news from on a bookmark folder in Firefox and middle clicking to open them all in new tabs.

      I did that too, about 4 years ago. Then it grew to opening up 30 tabs, and having to a) recall what the previous web-page state was and b) identify if anything changed in a mix of differing, sometimes slow-to-load layouts. It was in competition with my slashboxes, which were quite novel and useful

      • I guess maybe this is the keep - you have to be a total news junkie to really want RSS. Reading the other replies suggests the same thing. I need to read BBC News once a day, Slashdot once a day etc. I have maybe six sites I want to check every day, and every day there is new content.

        Quite how anyone could care enough to need over 300 feeds is beyond me. I'm not having a go at you, I just don't understand. Even if each one only produced 1 headline per day, I wouldn't have time to check them all. For me, it'
        • True, there's something about both:

          a/ wanting a lot of new, varied information
          b/ not caring about skimming through a bunch of noise to pick out some signal.

          A good aggregator makes the second point simpler, but the *varied* part of the former is interesting. It's not about "news" necessarily. I gave the Netflix new releases example, and I just now added the Project Gutenberg newly-available ebooks feed. Some from the forums for a couple of hobbies. A couple of my feeds are new software updates. Multiple

    • An RSS reader is better if you want to automate the checking of those sites you're interested in. You don't have to keep refreshing; the RSS aggregator does it for you and, depending on your client, can alert you if there is new content.

      This saves you the trouble of loading a new set of tabs and finding no new content. RSS readers are very good with infrequently updated pages. RSS readers also keep you up to date on frequently updated pages because you will be notified of new content once your reader disc

    • In Safari RSS you can set up a group of RSS feeds, show them all by date, by title, by keyword or just filter them with a search... so say you have 40 science feeds and you want to see if there's anything new in nano tech... (given that you've created a bookmark folder and put all the feeds in it) you can just click on 'show all feeds' in this folder... then use the search box to filter it on 'nano' or some other keyword... then adjust what you want to see with the content length slider (let's you see title
  • I fail to see whats so special about the site? Have a look at http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators [newsonfeeds.com]
  • The Daily Rotation [dailyrotation.com] is a headline site. It can also be customized.
  • erm... and? My site, KickRSS [kickrss.com], has been doing something similar for over a year now. It's far from alone - there's at least a dozen that I've come across (although none did quite what I wanted - merging multiple feeds, and outputting them as both an aggregated RSS feed and as a webpage that doesn't need a login).
    • This sounds a lot like something that Drupal [drupal.org] has built in, called a news aggregator. You can set the same thing up yourself very easily by installing drupal and enabling that module.

      Here's an example of how it can look:
      http://911source.org/aggregator [911source.org]

      Or you can browse by category:
      http://911source.org/aggregator/categories [911source.org]

    • Re:One up! (Score:5, Funny)

      by BadMrMojo (767184) on Sunday September 17 2006, @12:26AM (#16123336) Homepage
      How is this news?

      It's news because, by posting a news article on it, kdawson has finally achieved his ultimate goal of causing the universe to implode upon itself in a news paradox.

      Without news, there is no headline, without a headline, there can be no RSS feed, without the RSS feed, there can be no RSS Feed about RSS feeds and without a RSS feed about an RSS feed about RSS feeds, there can be no news. As soon as someone reads TFA, it's all over.

      Don't you see? We're screwed. Kdawson has will finally win and spread chaos across the face of the entire universe. Thank God people never RTFA. I'm guessing we have another 350-ish comments to go before some moron destroys all of creation by trying to view the information firsthand and make an informed comment. Fools.
        • That's alright; hell has a great unfiltered 10GigE connection for every user. Too bad your upload is rate-limited to 64k... :(
    • Wow, that tool sucks. Go for the MonkeyChow [monkeychow.org], dude.
    • Very well stated.

      Is there an AOL keyword for the website? Maybe a CompuServe one? Can I get this via my local ASCII dial-up BBS over 9600 baud? Shoot me if I am ever this desperate for a technology news source--this thing is like a stack of Hollywood tabloids for sale outside of a Hollywood studio. It is like a tech news website compiler posted to Slashdot. The only use is if you are paranoid that there may be SOMETHING out there that you did not read. How many article submitters have gotten their su
    • The one thing I'd like to see on ig (or have someone tell me another way to go about doing) would be combining multiple feeds into one content box. I read a number of comics, most of which have feeds, but i really dont need a content box per comic; I'd much rather a "comics" content box which has all the different comic feeds mashed together in order of date

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.