A Wizard for Content Discovery

Since our consumer products went free in January, some have wondered whether NewsGator is abandoning its consumer reader. Wonder no more. We have added some new features this week, and there are more on the way, all designed to make it easier for our users to find the content they want.

All the new changes are listed on the Home, or Today page (the one you see after you sign into the reader.) One of the new features allows you to customize the Today page to your own liking – even get rid of the list of new changes.

To do that, click the Settings tab, and look under “Today Page Display Settings.” By clicking on the check boxes, you can add or delete any or all of the elements -- Recent Changes, News Headlines, Today’s Videos and the tag cloud, called System Tags -- from your Home page.

Also, give the Content Wizard a try. You reach it by clicking on Browse Feeds. Page One offers feed bundles in popular categories from Celebs to Sports. If you click to the right of Included Feeds, you’ll see a list of what feeds are being offered. Add the feed bundles by clicking Add.

Below the popular categories, we have included new feed bundles for many industries like those we offer our corporate clients. These are more focused feeds that take you deeper into those categories. Make your choices and hit Next.

Page Two gives you the chance to create a local news feed. Simply type in your zip code and NewsGator will aggregate local news for you.

Page Three lets you create search feeds by typing in words, phrases, topics, a particular url or any other term you want to track on the web. This is our Smart Feed function, but more accessible.

Click on Next and then Finish and give NewsGator a little time to reconfigure your Home page. Your changes will show up pretty quickly.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator, Vice President, Products, discusses the new changes in a podcast here.

And don't forget that you can find thousands of feeds by clicking on Find Feeds and browsing our directory by category. There are a lot of good feeds in there.

Any problems, questions or suggestions, click on our forums page and let us know.

Next: New Tagging features.

Critics. Schmitics. Who Needs 'Em?

If you ever needed confirmation about how quickly things are changing in the music industry, you need look no further than an article written by music critic Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times about the Raconteurs’ decision to release its new album, Consolers of the Lonely, to critics as well as the general public on the same day. This follows similar moves by Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead that, in essence, eliminate the critic from the initial discussion of a CD.

This has caused consternation amongst those who write about music professionally. One of the hallmarks of the rock era (at least up until now) is that critics get CDs early so their reviews can appear the day of release. Some writers fear that this will blow up in the bands’ faces and surrender a valuable source of marketing for releases.

What a load. And I say this as someone who wrote professionally about music for a quarter century. It was hard to imagine that our readers took us critics seriously even ten years ago; to imagine they do so today is almost laughable. We find out about new music now through friends, blogs, B2B networks, ripped CDs, mp3s, MySpace and Facebook. When you buy a CD at Amazon.com, an algorhythm plays critic, offering other, similar titles to the one you just added to your virtual shopping cart.

Today, with the end of the blockbuster era, where new releases would sell millions of copies during its first week of release amidst a blitz of hype from advertising and reviews, it seems that musicians are no longer dependent on that first week’s sales – and marketing hype.

I always disliked the old approach. Faced with reviewing an album in two days, you listen, hoping to find something to write about, any hook to hang a review on. Quite often, that first review doesn’t really express how you feel about an album once you have lived with it for a couple of weeks and let the songs come to you on their own terms, not a deadline.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for good criticism and considered commentary. But a review should be a beginning point for a discussion, not the end of the subject. Wouldn’t you rather read a review after you have listened to an album and formed an opinion rather than read it to find out if your favorite critic liked it or not? Powers appreciates this, too, realizing how many times she has deemed an album a reject before she really had the chance to live with it.

Andrew Sarris, a New York film reviewer who wrote many years for the Village Voice and now for the New York Observer, always asked his readers to read his reviews after you saw the picture, not before. That way, the reader gets the most out of what the reviewer is trying to say.

In the Web 2.0 world, we are all critics, and we will be better for it.

Free RSS Readers, the Future of the Twittersphere and the River of News

Since NewsGator made the announcement in January that its consumer products would henceforth become free, followed by news that another paid reader, NewsFire, would follow suit, there has been no lack of people in the blogosphere trying to see beneath the surface of the moves. NewsGator explained its reasons pretty clearly when we made the switch, but it doesn’t stop people from speculating.

The Graphic Man, for instance, suggests that the readers went free because of the presence (or fear) of Google Reader. I’m more partial to Austin Heller, who argues that Google didn’t have much to do with our decision, which is what we said in the first place.

Meanwhile, Steve Gillmor over at eWeek opines about how Twitter seems poised to become a part in the new world of Enterprise RSS. And RSS pioneer Dave Winer posted another argument for why newspapers should be offering their online readers his River of News concept, which seems to make perfect sense to this longtime news reader.

 

14 More Reasons to Use FeedDemon

Hey, I like to brag about our products as much as anybody else out there. But I like it even better when our users do our bragging for us. Somebody at the techmalaya.com website – he or she isn’t named – switched feed readers to FeedDemon for Windows, and instead of reviewing the product comes up with 14 terrific reasons you should use FeedDemon as your feed reader.

I can’t argue with any of those points. And if you have Windows and you haven't tried FeedDemon, it is a free download at the NewsGator website.

Beatles Come Together on iTunes -- Or Do They?

Techcrunch is reporting that the Beatles entire catalog will soon become available for download on iTunes, which means that the Fab Four’s music will be widely available in a digital format for the first time.

But C/Net News is reporting that Michael Jackson’s company, Sony ATV Music Publishing, which owns much of the catalog and would share in the profits, is denying that the Fabs made a deal with Steve Jobs. And Reuters reports that Apple Inc., which oversees the Beatles’ business affairs, calls the stories “unsubstantiated speculation.” An Apple spokesman is quoted, "This is not news nor is it a scoop.”

So who’s right? At this point, we just don’t know. News like this outlines one of the problems with getting your information on the Web, and getting it quickly. With news sites and bloggers trying to be first to break news, there is a lot of unvetted information out there. The general rule of reporting is that you need two sources to print something (that’s the role that Mark Felt as Deep Throat played for Bernstein and Woodward during their Watergate reporting.) Today, with many bloggers and some journalists unaware of the need to substantiate all source material, information from one source has become more prevalent, and much of that content then becomes suspect and/or just plain wrong. And it moves through the Internet at lightning speed.

What’s the real story here? Will you soon be able to purchase “Strawberry Fields Forever as an MP3? We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, be careful what you read.

Using Smart Search to Find Wild Animals and Other Creatures

Anyone who uses an RSS reader knows that it is a great, time-saving way to keep up with news and weblogs and other Internet sources. One of the things that many users don’t know about RSS readers is that they are excellent tools for researching specific topics. If you are interested in a particular subject, your RSS reader can be put to use ferreting out information from multiple sources.

Blogger B.L. Ochman interviewed Doc Searls, senior editor at Linux Journal, about how internet pioneer Searls keeps up with the enormous amount of information out there. Searls explains that he tracks keywords rather than individual blogs, news sites or feeds, because, as he puts it, “I’m more interested in subjects than sources.”

If you find yourself in the same situation, consider using NewsGator’s Smart Feed functionality to study subjects rather than individual news or weblogs. You can find it by clicking on Add Feeds from the home page and then Smart Feeds. What it allows you to do is choose a keyword or words for which to search.

If you work at a company with a name as unique as “Newsgator,” Smart Search allows you to monitor the web for news stories, bloggers (both those who brag about our products and those who complain about them) and any other place our name shows up on the Internet. If you work for Smith and Company, it won’t help as much.

One of my personal interests is how predators and other wildlife interact with humans. I started by using Smart Feed keywords like “wolves,” “grizzlies” and “coyotes.” This brought back a few stories about the animals, but since it only searches for terms and not context, I got more high-school sports results (“Grizzlies Maul Hapless Ducks, 17-3”) than information I was actually looking for. I kept trying different combinations before finally coming up with one that worked. “Nuisance wildlife” brings me a nice complement of stories about municipalities, states, the federal government and their interactions and decisions regarding predators and critters.

If you haven’t tried Smart Search and you’re studying something, make sure and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find.

Headache Music

I ran across an Opinion piece yesterday in the New York Times written by Jeff Tweedy, the leader of the rock band Wilco. I have always given Tweedy the benefit of the doubt, especially about some of the offerings on Wilco’s latest albums, and especially the disc titled A Ghost is Born. A couple of the songs actually would give me a headache while listening.

As Tweedy explains in his piece, that was at least part of the point. Tweedy has suffered from migraine headaches, depression and panic anxiety almost his entire life, and after collapsing and entering a rehabilitation facility that treated his migraines in relation to his other maladies, he says he hasn’t had a migraine in several years. The headaches, depression and anxiety had a serious (and often deleterious) effect on his music, especially during the making of A Ghost is Born. One of the songs that especially got on my nerves was “Less Than You Think,” a long, slow piece that ends with an irritating, almost unlistenable 15-minute instrumental.

"There is a lot of material that mirrored my condition. In particular there’s a piece of music — “Less Than You Think” — that ends with a 12-minute drone that was an attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music," Tweedy writes. "I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had."

I still will probably hit the fast-forward button when “Less Than You Think” comes on the shuffle, but I appreciate what the song is trying to accomplish. And Tweedy’s journal will tell you more about creativity and mental health than anything you will read in music magazines about those subjects this year or any.

Despite dealing with subject matter that is in no way funny, he still manages to show a sense of humor about his situation: "You know, seeing a rock musician vomit on the side of the stage, I’m sure people thought I was completely out of my mind on drugs or strung out," he admits. "It didn’t have any kind of long term impact on how people perceived the band, though. Crazy thing is, in my business, that sort of thing is considered an asset. Sick but true."

FeedValidator, Feedburner: Good Bookmarks for RSS Users

It can get pretty confusing when you add an RSS or atom feed to your reader, and you get the message that the feed couldn’t be added. Now that might happen because you copied a url that didn’t correspond to the actual RSS url, or it could be because you got the right feed, but the feed itself is incorrectly formatted.

The best way to know if a feed is valid or not is to use a website that does just that. It’s FeedValidator.org, and it has helped me innumerable times over the last couple of years in dealing with our users’ folksonomy requests. Many of those come from people just getting involved in RSS, and even though I’m unfamiliar with code, I have found FV an invaluable aid in learning about RSS feeds and how they work.

FV's simple interface that gives you a box in which to enter your feed url, and it works with RSS 0.90-0.94, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and atom feeds. When you enter a feed url, FV finds problems, offers messages about the problems and possible solutions and generally helps you make sure your RSS feed is accurate. It is a good site to have bookmarked for easy access.

The best way to avoid a problem with your own feed is to use Feedburner to create a feed for your weblog. It’s easy to do, Feedburner feeds are almost always valid, and you can track statistics on your own weblog’s reach and readership, which could help you build a larger audience. Both of these websites offer helpful suggestions for anyone using RSS for their weblog or reading posts in an RSS reader.

RSS News Around the Blogosphere

The mission of MightyMerchant.com, it says on its website, is “to provide usiness owners with straightforward, comprehensive and affordable eCommerce services that produce positive financial results.” To that end, the blog, operated by Datahost Inc., uses RSS to get the message out. A recent post explains RSS and how to create and use RSS feeds. It’s a short, excellent look at the basics.

Those of you who use NewsGator Toolbar, be advised that there is an update available now that offers, as developer Nick Harris says, “a slew of bug fixes.” To find out more or download the update, click here.

And our developers for FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have each posted some tips and tricks of the custom feed reader trade. Brent Simmons has a series of posts titled Things You May Not Know About NetnewsWire in four categories: Browser Stuff; Reading Stuff; Subscriptions List Stuff; and Miscellaneous Stuff.

And not to be outdone, Nick Bradbury has just posted 10 Tiny FeedDemon Tips and Viewing Flickr Photos in FeedDemon. Since these are the guys who created and continue to feed and water these applications, you will pick up something new in these posts. I guarantee it.

How Quickly Do Feeds Update in NewsGator?

We get a lot of questions about how fast feeds are retrieved and updated in NewsGator. In a time of almost instant communication, we all want the latest stuff, and we want it NOW.

Greg Reinacker, our CIO and founder, knows a thing or two about the NewsGator system, and he explains in detail how it retrieves feeds and why certain feeds get updated more quickly than others, in a recent post on his weblog. If you’re wondering why your latest post didn’t show up as quickly as you thought it should or why your favorite feed isn't updating, it’s definitely worth a read.