[thelist] newsreaders and news aggregators

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Tue Sep 21 22:17:51 CDT 2004


My boss has discovered RSS news feeds and is really excited about using 
them internally to promote new internal web content.

Making the RSS XML file is very easy, but what I am having difficulty 
understanding are the applications that read it. Some of them read the 
RSS and show a list of items in one pane and the selected item in 
another pane. An example would be FeedReader, or NewsMac. Then there 
are other applications that look like web pages and load what almost 
looks like a bunch of advertisements. An example of that is 
AmphetaDesk. Is this what the difference is between a newsreader and a 
news aggregator? Is there a difference between newsreaders and news 
aggregators? People seem to use the term interchangeably, but the 
differences between all these applications is quite big.

Can anyone explain this to me?



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