News aggregator

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The user interface of the feed reader Tiny Tiny RSS Tiny Tiny RSS English Interface.png
The user interface of the feed reader Tiny Tiny RSS

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items. [1]

Contents

Contemporary news aggregators include Microsoft Start, Yahoo! News, Feedly, Inoreader, and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Function

The common web feed icon Feed-icon.svg
The common web feed icon

Aggregation technology often consolidates (sometimes syndicated) web content into one page that can show only the new or updated information from many sites. Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or personal newspaper. Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being pulled to the subscriber, as opposed to pushed with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some push information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed. The feeds are often in the RSS or Atom formats which use Extensible Markup Language (XML) to structure pieces of information to be aggregated in a feed reader that displays the information in a user-friendly interface. [1] Before subscribing to a feed, users have to install either "feed reader" or "news aggregator" applications in order to read it. The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in one browser display or desktop application. "Desktop applications offer the advantages of a potentially richer user interface and of being able to provide some content even when the computer is not connected to the Internet. Web-based feed readers offer the great convenience of allowing users to access up-to-date feeds from any Internet-connected computer." [2] Although some applications will have an automated process to subscribe to a news feed, the basic way to subscribe is by simply clicking on the web feed icon and/or text link. [2] Aggregation features are frequently built into web portal sites, in the web browsers themselves, in email applications, or in application software designed specifically for reading feeds. Aggregators with podcasting capabilities can automatically download media files, such as MP3 recordings. In some cases, these can be automatically loaded onto portable media players (like iPods) when they are connected to the end-users computer. By 2011, so-called RSS narrators appeared, which aggregated text-only news feeds, and converted them into audio recordings for offline listening. The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom.

History

RSS began in 1999 "when it was first introduced by Internet browser pioneer Netscape". [2] In the beginning, RSS was not a user-friendly gadget and it took some years to spread. "...RDF-based data model that people inside Netscape felt was too complicated for end users." [3] The rise of RSS began in the early 2000s when the New York Times implemented RSS: "One of the first, most popular sites that offered users the option to subscribe to RSS feeds was the New York Times, and the company's implementation of the format was revered as the 'tipping point' that cemented RSS's position as a de facto standard." [4] "In 2005, major players in the web browser market started integrating the technology directly into their products, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari." As of 2015, according to BuiltWith.com, there were 20,516,036 live websites using RSS. [5]

Types

Web aggregators gather material from a variety of sources for display in one location. They may additionally process the information after retrieval for individual clients. [6] For instance, Google News gathers and publishes material independent of customers' needs while Awasu [7] is created as an individual RSS tool to control and collect information according to clients' criteria. There are a variety of software applications and components available to collect, format, translate, and republish XML feeds, a demonstration of presentation-independent data. [ citation needed ]

News aggregation websites

A news aggregator provides and updates information from different sources in a systematized way. "Some news aggregator services also provide update services, whereby a user is regularly updated with the latest news on a chosen topic". [6] Websites such as Google News, Yahoo News, Bing News, and NewsNow where aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together. [8] Websites such as Drudge Report and HuffPost supplement aggregated news headline RSS feeds from a number of reputable mainstream and alternative news outlets, while including their own articles in a separate section of the website. [9]

News aggregation websites began with content selected and entered by humans, while automated selection algorithms were eventually developed to fill the content from a range of either automatically selected or manually added sources. Google News launched in 2002 using automated story selection, but humans could add sources to its search engine, while the older Yahoo News, as of 2005, used a combination of automated news crawlers and human editors. [10] [11] [12]

Web-based feed readers

Web-based feeds readers allow users to find a web feed on the internet and add it to their feed reader. These are meant for personal use and are hosted on remote servers. Because the application is available via the web, it can be accessed anywhere by a user with an internet connection. There are even more specified web-based RSS readers. [13]

More advanced methods of aggregating feeds are provided via Ajax coding techniques and XML components called web widgets. Ranging from full-fledged applications to small fragments of source code that can be integrated into larger programs, they allow users to aggregate OPML files, email services, documents, or feeds into one interface. Many customizable homepage and portal implementations provide such functionality.

In addition to aggregator services mainly for individual use, there are web applications that can be used to aggregate several blogs into one. One such variety—called planet sites—are used by online communities to aggregate community blogs in a centralized location. They are named after the Planet aggregator, a server application designed for this purpose.

Feed reader applications

Feed aggregation applications are installed on a PC, smartphone or tablet computer and designed to collect news and interest feed subscriptions and group them together using a user-friendly interface. The graphical user interface of such applications often closely resembles that of popular e-mail clients, using a three-panel composition in which subscriptions are grouped in a frame on the left, and individual entries are browsed, selected, and read in frames on the right.

Software aggregators can also take the form of news tickers which scroll feeds like ticker tape, alerters that display updates in windows as they are refreshed, web browser macro tools or as smaller components (sometimes called plugins or extensions), which can integrate feeds into the operating system or software applications such as a web browser.

Social news aggregators

Social news aggregators collect the most popular stories on the Internet, selected, edited, and proposed by a wide range of people. "In these social news aggregators, users submit news items (referred to as "stories"), communicate with peers through direct messages and comments, and collaboratively select and rate submitted stories to get to a real-time compilation of what is currently perceived as "hot" and popular on the Internet." [14] Social news aggregators are based on engagement of community. Their responses, engagement level, and contribution to stories create the content and determine what will be generated as RSS feed.

Frame- and media-bias–aware news aggregators

Media bias and framing are concepts that fundamentally explain deliberate or accidental differences in news coverage. A simple example is comparing media coverage of a topic in two countries, which are in (armed) conflict with another: one can easily imagine that news outlets, particularly if state-controlled, will report differently or even contrarily on the same events (for instance, the Russo-Ukrainian War). While media bias and framing have been subject to manual research for a couple of decades in the social sciences, only recently have automated methods and systems been proposed to analyze and show such differences. Such systems make use of text-features, e.g., news aggregators that extract key phrases that describe a topic differently, or other features, such as matrix-based news aggregation, which spans a matrix over two dimensions, the first dimension being which country an article was published in, and the second being which country it is reporting on. [15] [16]

Media aggregators

Media aggregators are sometimes referred to as podcatchers due to the popularity of the term podcast used to refer to a web feed containing audio or video. Media aggregators are client software or web-based applications which maintain subscriptions to feeds that contain audio or video media enclosures. They can be used to automatically download media, playback the media within the application interface, or synchronize media content with a portable media player. Multimedia aggregators are the current focus. EU launched the project Reveal This to embedded different media platforms in RSS system. "Integrated infrastructure that will allow the user to capture, store, semantically index, categorize and retrieve multimedia, and multilingual digital content across different sources – TV, radio, music, web, etc. The system will allow the user to personalize the service and will have semantic search, retrieval, summarization." [6]

Broadcatching

Broadcatching is a mechanism that automatically downloads BitTorrent files advertised through RSS feeds. [17] Several BitTorrent client software applications such as Azureus and μTorrent have added the ability to broadcatch torrents of distributed multimedia through the aggregation of web feeds.

Feed filtering

One of the problems with news aggregators is that the volume of articles can sometimes be overwhelming, especially when the user has many web feed subscriptions. As a solution, many feed readers allow users to tag each feed with one or more keywords which can be used to sort and filter the available articles into easily navigable categories. Another option is to import the user's Attention Profile to filter items based on their relevance to the user's interests.

RSS and marketing

Some bloggers predicted the death of RSS when Google Reader was shut down. [18] [19] Later, however, RSS was considered more of a success as an appealing way to obtain information. "Feedly, likely the most popular RSS reader today, has gone from around 5,000 paid subscribers in 2013 to around 50,000 paid subscribers in early 2015 – that's a 900% increase for Feedly in two years." [20] Customers use RSS to get information more easily while businesses take advantage of being able to spread announcements. "RSS serves as a delivery mechanism for websites to push online content to potential users and as an information aggregator and filter for users." [21] However, it has been pointed out that in order to push the content RSS should be user-friendly to ensure [22] proactive interaction so that the user can remain engaged without feeling "trapped", good design to avoid being overwhelmed by stale data, and optimization for both desktop and mobile use. RSS has a positive impact on marketing since it contributes to better search engine rankings, to building and maintaining brand awareness, and increasing site traffic. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS</span> Family of web feed formats

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

BitTorrent, also referred to as simply torrent, is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner. The protocol is developed and maintained by Rainberry, Inc., and was first released in 2001. A 2004 study by Cachelogic found that one third of all internet traffic was BitTorrent traffic.

Web syndication is making content available from one website to other sites. Most commonly, websites are made available to provide either summaries or full renditions of a website's recently added content. The term may also describe other kinds of content licensing for reuse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (web standard)</span> Web standards

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web feed</span> Data format

On the World Wide Web, a web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client. Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer."

Broadcatching is the downloading of digital content that has been made available over the Internet using RSS.

Push technology, also known as server push, refers to a communication method, where the communication is initiated by a server rather than a client. This approach is different from the "pull" method where the communication is initiated by a client.

Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data. They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary.

A mashup, in web development, is a web page or web application that uses content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. For example, a user could combine the addresses and photographs of their library branches with a Google map to create a map mashup. The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open application programming interfaces and data sources to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data. The term mashup originally comes from creating something by combining elements from two or more sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Reader</span> Defunct RSS/Atom feed aggregator formerly operated by Google

Google Reader is a discontinued RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of programs which used it as a platform for serving news and information to users. Google shut down Google Reader on July 1, 2013, citing declining use.

In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more Ping servers, as specified by originating weblog), to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.

RSS Bandit is an open source RSS/Atom aggregator based on the Microsoft .NET framework. It was originally released as a code sample in a series of articles the Extreme XML column written by Dare Obasanjo on MSDN in 2003. The code samples were developed into an open source project. It is currently hosted on GitHub and the primary contributors are Dare Obasanjo and Torsten Rendelmann.

Web syndication technologies were preceded by metadata standards such as the Meta Content Framework (MCF) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as well as by 'push' specifications such as Channel Definition Format (CDF). Early web syndication standards included Information and Content Exchange (ICE) and RSS. More recent specifications include Atom and GData.

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services into a unified presentation. Examples of social network aggregators include Hootsuite or FriendFeed, which may pull together information into a single location or help a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into a single profile.

The following is a comparison of RSS feed aggregators. Often e-mail programs and web browsers have the ability to display RSS feeds. They are listed here, too.

Sitrion (formerly NewsGator Technologies) is a multinational software company headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Sitrion develops and markets mobility and collaboration software. It was founded in 2004 under the name NewsGator. It was initially a consumer company focused on RSS aggregation, before shifting its focus to the enterprise market. The company raised $12 million in funding in 2007 and acquired Tomoye in 2010. In 2013, NewsGator acquired Sitrion, and in 2014, chose to keep the same name.

Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites, and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to "flip" through the articles, images, and videos being shared. Readers can also save stories into Flipboard magazines. As of March 2016 the company claims there have been 28 million magazines created by users on Flipboard. The service can be accessed via web browser, or by a Flipboard application for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and via mobile apps for iOS and Android. The client software is available at no charge and is localized in 21 languages.

The Old Reader is a web-based news aggregator that delivers website, blog, and other Internet content to a web-based inbox. The service sprang up when Google removed social features from Google Reader; the site supports social media sharing, including the ability to "like" content, and find friends via social media networks.

Feed Viewer is a news aggregator application for PCs and mobile devices running Windows. It presents online sources for the user in unified layout. Feed Viewer was first released in 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inoreader</span>

Inoreader is a web-based content and RSS feed reader, a cloud-based service for web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android. It compiles news feeds from online sources for the user in unified layout to customize and share with others. Inoreader was first released by Innologica in 2013.

References

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  2. 1 2 3 Doree, Jim (1 January 2007). "RSS: A Brief Introduction". The Journal of Manual & Manipulative Therapy. 15 (1): 57–58. doi:10.1179/106698107791090169. ISSN   1066-9817. PMC   2565593 . PMID   19066644.
  3. ↑ Hammersley, Ben (2005). Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom . Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN   978-0-596-00881-9.
  4. ↑ "Google Reader is dead but the race to replace the RSS feed is very alive". Digital Trends. July 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2015.
  5. ↑ "RSS Usage Statistics". trends.builtwith.com. Retrieved 21 December 2015.
  6. 1 2 3 Chowdhury, Sudatta; Landoni, Monica (2006). "News aggregator services: user expectations and experience". Online Information Review. 30 (2): 100–115. doi:10.1108/14684520610659157.
  7. ↑ "Welcome to Awasu". www.Awasu.com. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
  8. ↑ "Google News and newspaper publishers: allies or enemies?". Editorsweblog.org. World Editors Forum. Retrieved 31 March 2009.
  9. ↑ Luscombe, Belinda (19 March 2009). "Arianna Huffington: The Web's New Oracle". Time. Time Inc. Archived from the original on 21 March 2009. Retrieved 30 March 2009. The Huffington Post was to have three basic functions: blog, news aggregator with an attitude and place for premoderated comments.
  10. ↑ Hansell, Saul (24 September 2002). "All the news Google algorithms say is fit to print". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  11. ↑ Hill, Brad (24 October 2005). Google Search & Rescue For Dummies . John Wiley & Sons. p.  85. ISBN   978-0-471-75811-2.
  12. ↑ LiCalzi O'Connell, Pamela (29 January 2001). "New Economy; Yahoo Charts the Spread of the News by E-Mail, and What It Finds Out Is Itself Becoming News". New York Times.
  13. ↑ Butler, Declan (25 June 2008). "Scientists get online news aggregator". Nature News. 453 (7199): 1149. doi:10.1038/4531149b. PMID   18580906. S2CID   205037759.
  14. ↑ Doerr, Christian; Blenn, Norbert; Tang, Siyu; Van Mieghem, Piet (2012). "Are Friends Overrated? A Study for the Social News Aggregator Digg.com". Computer Communications. 35 (7): 796–809. arXiv: 1304.2974 . doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2012.02.001. ISSN   0140-3664. S2CID   15187700.
  15. ↑ Felix Hamborg, Norman Meuschke, and Bela Gipp, Matrix-based News Aggregation: Exploring Different News Perspectives in Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), 2017.
  16. ↑ Felix Hamborg, Norman Meuschke and Bela Gipp, Bias-aware News Analysis using Matrix-based News Aggregation in the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL), 2018.
  17. ↑ Zhang, Zengbin; Lin, Yuan; Chen, Yang; Xiong, Yongqiang; Shen, Jacky; Liu, Hongqiang; Deng, Beixing; Li, Xing (2009). "Experimental Study of Broadcatching in BitTorrent". 2009 6th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference. pp. 1–5. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.433.6539 . doi:10.1109/CCNC.2009.4784862. ISBN   978-1-4244-2308-8. S2CID   342057.
  18. ↑ "R.I.P. RSS? Google to shut down Google Reader". www.Gizmag.com. 14 March 2013. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
  19. ↑ Olanoff, Drew. "Google Reader's Death Is Proof That RSS Always Suffered From Lack Of Consumer Appeal". Techcrunch. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
  20. ↑ "Is RSS Dead? A Look At The Numbers". MakeUseOf. 25 March 2015. Retrieved 21 December 2015.
  21. ↑ Ma, Dan (1 December 2012). "Use of RSS feeds to push online content to users". Decision Support Systems. 54 (1): 740–749. doi:10.1016/j.dss.2012.09.002.
  22. ↑ "Google Reader is dead but the race to replace the RSS feed is very alive". Digital Trends. July 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2015.
  23. ↑ Hammersley, Ben (2005). Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom . California: O'Reilly Media, Inc. pp.  11. ISBN   9780596519001.
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