In Part 1 of this series I suggested that using an RSS aggregator or news reader was a convenient and time-saving way of staying up to date on news sites and blogs - websites whose content changes frequently. I also suggested that the variety of products and services available made it difficult to recommend just one as the best way to go.

In this post I’m going to look at one category of readers, web-based services, summarize the advantages of this class of products and provide some feedback on four of the services that I looked at.

I should mention that Kevin Hayden did much of the research on which I relied for this and subsequent posts. He read the product reviews and supplied me with lists of what seemed to be the most highly regarded in various categories and on various platforms. I then ruthlessly eliminated those that I didn’t feel like testing didn’t match my needs and prejudices to get to a short list of products I actually looked at. The decisions involved in compiling the short list, and the opinions expressed, are strictly my own. Differing opinions and corrections to errors of fact are invited.

And I’ll add that in the discussion that follows I continue to focus heavily on blogs because they make more demands on a news reader than straight news does. And with all of that out of the way, the adventure continues below the fold.

There are some advantages to web-based services compared to some of the other types of readers:

• You’re working inside your browser which is the application designed to view websites in the first place. As a Firefox user, right-clicking on a link and selecting Open Link in New Tab comes almost as naturally to me as breathing. It’s what I do when I’m reading a blog post that includes links to sources, so using a browser-based reader is just an extension of that provided the necessary links are easily accessible.
• These services are cross-platform. If you can view the blogs to which you want to subscribe without problems, then you’ve met the �€œminimum system requirement.�€�
• There’s nothing to install and nothing to upgrade. There’s a one-time account setup, requiring little more than a valid email account in most cases, and you’re done. From then on you simply log in when you want to read. If the standards continue to evolve, as I suspect they will, these services don’t have to push a program upgrade down to the users. They make the changes and with any luck you don’t even notice - you log in and it just works.
• You can sit down at any computer with an internet connection and get access to your personalized list of favorites. As long as you can remember which one of your gazillion passwords the thing wants.

Two of the services I test drove offered a very similar interface to the desktop programs I’ll write about in the next installment. The browser window is divided vertically with the narrower column on the left used as a sidebar to contain your list of feeds and the larger right-hand column is used as the viewing window for the content of the feed you select. I’ll get to those in a minute but first I’ll look at the two that departed from that format.

Kinja displays the posts from all your feeds in one list, newest to oldest. So reading from the top you might see a post from Atrios, followed by one from Josh Marshall, followed by two from Susan Madrak, followed by another from Atrios, etc. Think of it as kind of a bloggy buffet. The only way to tell when you’ve seen all the new content is to keep reading until you get to something you’ve already read. (And if there are news sites on your feed list that update in bursts, like the BBC, you might find five successive news items in the midst of your favorite bloggers.) That may suit some but it seemed awkward to me. If I’m catching up on Josh Marshall I want to read all the Josh Marshall there is. I’ll get to Atrios when I’m ready. (No offense, big guy.) I should also note that Kinja only provides an excerpt even if the feed supplies the entire article, forcing you to use the link to the post. On the plus side, it also offers a handy link to the site’s front page. Kinja also provides for adding new feeds in batches of five rather than one at a time, which is also a handy feature when you’re just getting started.

Feedster will allow you to set up a view similar to the one Kinja provides but will also let you select one feed at time. While it uses the left hand column as a sidebar, it does it differently than most readers. The sidebar always contains the management functions while your feed list is presented in the content window when you request it. Selecting a feed uses the same piece of real estate to display the content. It does display the entire post when possible and provides links to both the individual posts and the site’s front page. When you’re done with a particular feed you can click on a �€œNext�€� link that will open the next feed alphabetically in your list, whether or not there’s anything new to see, or you can go back to the sidebar and click on the link that restores the view of your feed lists. If it’s fair to assume that 20% of your time will be spent in managing the service and 80% in actually using it to view content, then it seems to me that Feedster has optimized the 20% and made the 80% a bit more cumbersome. All those extra clicks will add up. And while Feedster indicates the elapsed time since the last update for each feed, that isn’t the easiest and most intuitive way to tell a user which feeds have unread content. For that, read on.

NewsGator offers various levels of service online �€“ most of which you pay for and can include premium, �€œexclusive�€� feeds �€“ as well as a desktop product. I looked at the entry level online service which is free and offers more than enough to serve as a decent aggregator. When you log in, your feeds are in the left-hand sidebar and if there is new or unread content in a feed then the number of new articles is appended in brackets after the feed title, e.g. The American Street (4). That’s what I’m looking for: instant gratification. When you left-click on a feed to select it, the content is presented in the viewing area on the right in plain text but with any embedded links accessible. If the feed supplies the entire post, you can simply read it here. If you prefer the full HTML experience, the post title is also a link to the archival copy of the post. Note that comments are inaccessible in this view no matter what kind of commenting system the blog uses, but that’s true of all these services. NewsGator’s interface is slicker than any of the others in terms of some functions, such as organizing your feeds into separate folders. But one shortcoming is that no link is provided to the site’s front page unless you select a different view, one which doesn’t tell you anything about how fresh the content is. There are two other points worth mentioning. One is that NewsGator makes no assumptions about when you’re finished with content - it leaves it to you to mark individual posts, or all the posts in the current page, as �€œread�€�. The other is that NewsGator supplies a �€œclipping service�€�, allowing you to store individual articles in a Clippings folder for later reference.

Bloglines may be the most popular of these services and it’s the one I would choose were this the type of service I wanted. The basic interface, and the way new content is flagged, is as described above for NewsGator. It also offers a clipping service. Unlike NewsGator, it assumes that once you’ve accessed a feed, you’re going to read the entire contents and instead offers a check box on each post so you can mark something as �€œunread�€�, in which case it will continue to be treated as new content. That and the fact that its feed list management functions aren’t quite as slick as NewsGator’s, though they’re still offered, make it a bit more cumbersome in some ways. But in addition to the links to individual posts Bloglines provides a link to the site’s front page at the top of the viewing area. In the case of frequent posters I like to use this to go to the blog and work my down just as if I’d arrived by way of my bookmark. That may seem a picky point to some but I like that option enough that it sways me.

All of these services offer full support for importing and exporting your feed lists. All of them read every feed I threw at them and all included auto-discovery, meaning that I could supply the site’s main address and the service would check to see if it could find a feed on its own. Bloglines often found several different feeds from one site and allowed me to preview them all before deciding which one I wanted to subscribe to. And this might be a good place to mention that many blogs offer feeds even if it’s not advertised and the blogger herself may not realize it. I plugged the URLs for the front pages of a couple of LiveJournal blogs into Bloglines and it found feeds. Many Blogspot blogs offer feeds in the Atom format even if the URL isn’t published.

So what do you lose by choosing one of these over the products to be discussed in the next installment? Control, for one. You’re at the mercy of the service provider as to how often the feeds are updated �€“ usually once per hour. And the possibilities for providing a fully featured user interface using drop-down menus, toolbars filled to the brim with buttons, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts and context menus (the ones that pop up in response to a right-click in Windows) simply aren’t there in a web application. Finally, you have to be on-line to use these. If you haven’t been using any kind of aggregator then you haven’t lost any ground on that score but the desktop products allow you store the feeds, making them accessible even when you’re not connected.

And those will be the subject of Part 3, due in two or three days.