New Blog Aggregator...

Jeremy Allaire (formerly of Macromedia and before that Allaire) phoned me Friday to sync up and chat a little about the future of the web.  One of the things we talked a little about was the current state of blogs and blog aggregators (we had met once before at a web developer conference where we had both done keynotes -- but reconnected by stumbling on each others Blogs). 

He recommended checking out Newz Crawler (free trial at: http://www.newzcrawler.com/downloads.shtml) which does a good job of handling RSS feeds.  I downloaded it this afternoon and gave it a spin.  So far, I've been impressed with it (although admitedly my previous aggregation technique was using the "Add To Favorites" link of my browser). 

It includes a number of built-in RSS feeds from various news sources (BBC, ZDNET, etc).  Frankly I wasn't aware that all these "traditional" web sites provided RSS feeds of their articles and content.  This really opened my eyes to the power of RSS (I feel like something of a luddite saying that -- but oh well).  Unfortunately some of the sites I frequent still aren't RSS enabled -- but hopefully this will change soon.

I feel somewhat guilty that the www.asp.net website doesn't publish its content yet via RSS (examples: article of the day, new control gallery submissions, frequent posts on the forums, etc).  We need to get that changed (I'm putting it on my long list of things todo).