What exactly is a news aggregator?
It's a piece of software that grabs the feeds of your favorite sites and then compiles them all in one neat and tidy package for you. It's like having your own personal, automated research assistant, and if you do lots of internet research, it can save your life!
The one I use is called Bloglines. All you have to do is sign up (it's free)and add the URLs of the sites you'd like to subscribe to.
I do a bunch of blog research for eSoup, so I have about 26 blogs that are in my news aggragator. It used to be that I had all these sites bookmarked and that I would have to manually go to each site. Time consuming!
Now, all I have to do is to go to Bloglines, click to see "My Feeds", and up pops a list of all the sites I track. I click on the name of each site, and I can see the most recent posts. I've set my Bloglines preferences up so only the blogs that have new material appear in "My Feeds".
I'm telling you, it took me a while to warm up to the idea of a news aggregator, but now that I'm using it, I'm saving hours of time each week.
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