FeedDemon 2.5- Making the Best Even Better

As you might have seen over the past few days, the latest incarnation of FeedDemon, version 2.5 has been released. Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon 2.1, which came out a little over a year-ago, is the reigning king of RSS aggregators for Windows, according to numerous experts such as CNET and PC Magazine. FeedDemon 2.5 is even better than it's predecessor and the early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.

Despite the "point release" moniker, FeedDemon 2.5 is chock full of new capabilities. Check the release notes for more details, but some highlights include:

• Synchronized News Bins with shared RSS feeds - This can be done by giving someone the URL of the news bin or synchronizing it with the Clippings function in NewsGator Online or NewsGator Enterprise Server (I use FeedDemon as my primary reader and this is incredibly useful function because I know clip articles to a News Bin, sync that with a clippings folder in NGES and then subscribe the exec staff or the sales reps to that folder. We have some customers looking to created newsletters through the FeedDemon News Bins in this same manner)
• Enhanced offline support - including the ability to prefetch links and images in all unread items for offline reading (Do this right before heading out to catch a train or head to the airport and have everything waiting for you when you turn your computer back on)
• New "Popular Topics” capabilities - In addition to seeing the most popular topics in all the feeds you’re subscribed to, with one-click, you can see the most popular articles from the larger NewsGator subscriber population
• Embedded video support - Video objects embedded in feed items can now be securely viewed inside FeedDemon (If a new post comes along with an embedded video from YouTube, you can watch it right from the "Newspaper View")
• Desktop Alerts- Configure these to notify you of updates for the feeds you deem to be the most important (If you're using FeedDemon for brand monitoring or competitive intelligence, this will be very helpful)

FeedDemon already was already lightning fast, but Nick managed to turbo-charge it and make it even quicker, which is never a bad thing.

If you're already a FeedDemon user, run don't walk to go get this new release. If you aren't a FeedDemon user, try it out free for 30 days. You'll definitely be hooked.

Technorati Tags:  rss, NewsGator, FeedDemon

NewsGator Online Selected as Webware 100 Finalist

The editors of Webware.com (a CNET site) selected NewsGator as a finalist for the Webware 100 awards in the category of "Browsing: Web browsers, extensions, widgets, and security." The beta version of the new-look RSS reader has been drawing rave reviews. The winners will be chosen in large part based on user-voting, so we encourage you to show your support by voting for the product here.

Thanks again for your continued support!

Technorati Tags:  rss, NewsGator, NewsGator Online

NewsGator to provide Web 2.0 applications for all Media General websites

If you haven't seen the press release - take a look - Media General has partnered with us to deliver our full suite of Web 2.0 applications for all their online properties. Since we formalized this relationship a few weeks ago, we've already launched two widgets on the inrich.com site.

Here's a little bit about what we've built for them-

On the right is a 'checkbox' widget, it lives on each section front of the Inrich.com site (news, sports, entertainment, etc). The content presented in the widget is specific to the section and allows light personalization by the user. When a checkbox is selected, the articles for that publication appear below, and the selections are remembered between visits. 

Click here or on the image to see the live version.

The second widget which we deployed on the inrich.com site lives on the article pages. We call it the 'flyout', aptly named because of the way the content is included in a small flyout to the left of the headlines. See the image below.

The flyout serves a few purposes, while closed it shows the recent headlines around news, sports, etc (whatever section the article is in) as well as the most popular articles for that section as well - users can click on different tabs to see the different lists. It also has a tab set for videos - where the user can chose from any number of popular clips.

Once the user clicks on a piece of content, the flyout is expanded to the left, and the user is presented with more content from that headline. You'll also note the user has different ways to interact with the content, in this case the user can email or rate the content they read or watch. If they chose video, we'll play the video inline, so the user isn't taken off the site to see the clip. If you'd like to see this in action, click here, or click on the image below.

We're excited to be working with Media General - they are a great group to work with, and we look forward to rolling out this functionality to other sites! We'll keep you posted!

New Webinar on 5/23: Internal Comms 2.0

Calling all internal communications professionals! We have a new Webinar called "Internal Comms 2.0: Understanding the RSS and Social Software Revolution" on Wednesday, May 23rd at 2:00 EDT. I will the moderator of this Webinar and panel discussion and we'll be hearing from three distinguished guests:

Jeff Treem, Senior Analyst, Change and Employee Engagement Group, Edelman Worldwide

William Hayes, Director of Library Services, Biogen Idec

Dave Carter, Founder and CTO, iUpload

Ragan Communications, which has a great set of resources, publications and programs for communications professionals, is the sponsor of this event and has helped to promote it. At last count, more than 600 people had signed up, a reflection of the fact that organizations have increasingly turned to RSS and other Enterprise 2.0 tools to help them improve the way the communicate to and engage with their employees.

If you are a communications professional, I would strongly encourage you to attend this event or watch the archived version, which will be available later that afternoon. If you are in the IT or emerging technologies side of your organization, feel free to point your internal comms counterparts over to the registration page. Everyone who attends or watches the archived version will get free copies of two very useful studies and toolkits from Ragan and Edelman.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Internal+Communications, social+software, ragan

Track Climate Change With RSS

No matter which side of the equation you find yourself, it seems that everybody has an opinion about climate change, or as some call it, global warming.

There is an enormous amount of scientific debate about the subject on the Internet, and to help you find the best content, our editors have added a new category called Climate Change under Science.

There are magazines and newspapers that report regularly, several portal sites (Climate Ark Climate Change, ClimateWire and FindArticles About Global Warming) that gather climate-change news from different sources around the web and official government information (U.S. Global Change Research Information Office). We even added in a couple of Global Warming Hoax feeds to keep things interesting.
You can copy the feed URLs from the above links, or click on Add Feeds and then the Science category, which includes the Climate Change subcategory.

Really Simple Savings

A lot is being written about how RSS can save businesses money by giving their employees access to updated information, but as an article this week in the Hartford Courant points out, RSS can save consumers money, too.

Writer Gregory Karp includes links to financial institutions and bloggers who offer content and advice on how to save money, use credit or buy a home. Since RSS brings you every update, you don't have to keep checking back to get the latest stock information or mortgage rate -- they come to your reader.

There are plenty of sources aimed at all age and income levels, from twentysomethings to those facing retirement, and they are come from well-known MSM sources like Consumer Reports as well as individual bloggers of all ages and backgrounds.

NewsGator subscribers have access to those financial feeds as well as many others. Go to Add Feeds in your reader. You will get a page that lists categories. Click on Business and then Personal Finance/Investment and subscribe to anything that looks interesting. You will also see categories for Real Estate, Home Business and Sales/Deals, if you're interested in those subjects.

A Busy Day at NewsGator!

For those of you used to very frequent posts in this blog, April was unusually quiet. However, May is starting off with a bang. We have a lot of exciting items to talk about including NewsGator Enterprise Server 2.0, new customers for our business offerings, a brand new Web site and a new Webinar.

Let's start with NewsGator Enterprise Server 2.0. Version 1.0 of this award-winning product came out 19 months ago and we released four "point" versions over the last year. NGES 2.0 is the most significant update we've had and is designed to become the foundation for large companies Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. The release is chock-full of new features, but there are four categories in particular that I want to highlight. They include:

• New Ajax Interface- The Web reader is faster and more powerful, thanks to a drag-and-drop Ajax interface. We also added options for displaying and sorting feeds
• Collaboration and Relevancy- We've added the ability to tag posts, sort by tags and discover tagged articles through a tag cloud. We also included a relevancy engine allowing users to see which articles and feeds are are most important to them or their peers
• Feed Reading Options- Giving people the most ways to access feeds has always been a differentiator for us and we go even further adding support for NewsGator Go! (Blackberry and Windows Mobile)NewsGator Desktop (pop-up notifier), Lotus Notes (6.5 and higher) and Lotus Sametime 7.5.
• SharePoint 2007- Many of our largest customers and prospects are adopting Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as their departmental or enterprise portal and we help them extend that capability through our "Site News" Web Part, which brings updated, relevant feeds into MOSS. We also leverage MOSS as a publishing platform by taking RSS feeds from MOSS and distributing them to the other feed-reading locations

The new Web reader (both UI and relevancy/collaboration features), the new feed reading clients (BlackBerry in particular) and the SharePoint integration have been especially well received. There are a lot of other features including a new reporting interface, but you can read about those in the release, but everyone we have shown the product to has been extremely excited.

Next let's talk about Adoption of NewsGator Products by Businesses. More than a 100 companies, a majority of them being Fortune 1000 companies or highly recognizable brands, have purchased NewsGator Enterprise Server and NewsGator Private Label Platform. Some of the new ones include Biogen Idec, Willis Re, Woman's Day and a couple of newspapers that are owned by the New York Times Regional Media Group.  That list also includes some companies we can't mention including Fortune 100 banks, defense contractors, entertainment and media conglomerates and semiconductor manufacturers. We'll be talking more about them in this blog in the future, but in the meantime, you can read about them what they are doing with NGES and NewsGator Private Label Platform.

Next up, we have a brand new Web site. It's been over a year since our last redesign and the focus of the new site was to better delineate our products for individuals from our products for businesses. The home page is a little cleaner, navigation is clearer and we added a lot of interactivity in the interior sections. Finally, we're eating our own dog food here and the news components on the site are all powered by the NewsGator Widget Framework (a.k.a Buzz) that is part of the Private Label Platform. We would appreciate any feedback you have regarding the new site.

Last, but not least, we have a new Webinar to mention. It's called "Increasing Portal Usage and Value with RSS" and it features Brian Kellner from NewsGator and Steve Todd from Microsoft. If you are a portal administrators, portal developer or a marketer responsible for putting content on a portal, this free, one-hour event is absolutely worth your time You can sign up here.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, portal,