Sailing Uncharted Waters

Post by Leland Rucker May 26, 2005

A recent telephone survey from the Pew Internet and American Life project reveals that six million Americans today get news and information via RSS feeds. (The full report is available here.)

That is one of the reasons we created a structure to help users find the information they want. Around here, we call it, for better or worse, the Taxonomy (almost like it’s a living, breathing entity). To users, it’s just the list of categories that you get when you click Add Feeds in NewsGator.

At first it was a chore to find sites that offered RSS or XML links for syndicating their content. A few prescient media outlets, notably The New York Times, were using RSS, but they were the exceptions rather than the rule.

That was less than six months ago, and things are changing – fast. Daily newspapers are adding RSS feeds like crazy. Just in the last couple of weeks, I have added feeds from The Anchorage Daily News (part of the McClatchy chain, which has now added feeds to all its sites), The Rocky Mountain News and Boulder Daily-Camera (both members of the Scripps chain) and The New York Daily News, among others.

The Associated Press, a large newsgathering syndicate with hundreds of newspapers around the country, now offers RSS feeds that update A.P stories every couple of hours --- right to your computer. This is a revolutionary concept that will change the way the A.P. and newspapers do business. You can sign up for all A.P. feeds through NewsGator

There is more than enough news today to satisfy even the widest-ranging news junkie.

Our main News category is divided into several sub-categories. The largest is Daily News/Newspapers, which lists mostly front pages or top news from dozens of papers around the country. There are sub-cats devoted to college newspapers, environmental news, news magazines, TV and radio news outlets and world news, which includes foreign newspapers in English.

If, like me, you love to read opinion, you can find a profusion of that, too -- on every side of the political spectrum -- in the categories Newspaper Op/Ed, Editorial Cartoonists and Political. There is even a category for Offbeat News.

My personal favorite is Pundits and Blogs, which gathers newspaper columnists of every political stripe as well as bloggers whose primary interest is politics or news. There is, to say the least, spirited discussion going on across the Web.

So, come on in and join the party!