RSS - the good...

I'm amazed at how, in the space of a few short months, RSS and aggregators have fundamentally changed how I collect and read information. It's not very often that I can that say that about a technology. Although I've been aware of blogs and RSS for a while, it was really NewsGator that pulled it all together for me. Aggregators that brought all of the info to me were cool. An aggregator that brought all of the information to me into the one application that I spend virtually all of my time running is what brought it home. Usually the use of marketing-speak like "synergy" makes me dry heave, but NewsGator is a great example of that concept. It builds on the infrastructure that Outlook provides and extends it in a totally natural way. I have access to my mailbox through IMAP, so I can check the latest and greatest news from just about anywhere (what would I do without Mail2Web) without worrying about duplicating my feeds all over the place. As far as I'm concerned, it's the closest thing to the "Information At Your Fingertips"  mantra (remember Big Bill's grand vision) since the Palm came on the scene.

Obviously not everyone runs Outlook, so not everyone will use NewsGator. But for those who do run Outlook as a primary productivity tool, I've yet to see anything that beats NewsGator.

OK, this wasn't meant to be a pucker-up session for NewsGator - RSS is the core enabling technology behind it, and it's a gem. I find myself increasingly impatient with sites that don't maintain RSS feeds. I have a folder in my IE favorites of my "daily check" web sites.  I want that folder to go away, dammit. I want my computer to do that work for me - that's what it's there for. People are starting to get the message, but not fast enough. Come on, folks at Codeproject, Sysinternals, and Strouds, let's get with the program. I'm impressed that a company as big as Microsoft got on the bandwagon as quickly as they did for the MSDN site. It doesn't seem to be quite real time (articles show up on the site that aren't in the feed yet), but it's a start.