AGGREGATORS and FEEDS

Last week we worked very hard!! We tried to understand what is an ‘aggregator’ or ‘feed aggregator’ and what kind of feeds we can add to our personal blogs…let’s start!

“In general internet terms, a news aggregation website is a website where headlines are collected, usually manually, by the website owner. Examples of this sort of website are the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.”

In order to add an aggregator to our personal blogs we went on Bloglines. It is a free aggregator, that is a web site in which we can add feeds (we will discovers what feeds are in the next paragraph!!).

I registered my username and password on Bloglines. In the left part of the site you can see different sections: feeds, blog, clipping and playlist. In the part of the feeds I add the Urls of some blogs of English and American newspapers; in other words I subscribed to those blogs.

In each personal blog there is the possibility of adding a gadget: if you write in the search window of the gadget ‘bloglines’ it should appear the Bloglines’ function for blogs. By adding that function, in the main page of the Blog should appear a little window: you will be notified about new posts or comments that are made daily in the blogs to which you subscribed.

In my blog you can see the window ‘Bloglines notifier’. –first step-

“In computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

A web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an Internet aggregator. A web feed is also sometimes referred to as a syndicated feed.”

I have the feeds of: BBC News, CNN, National Geographic and of course I subscribed to the blogs of my peers!

On Bloglines we also created a Playlist. Our playlist is called “three is a magic number”!! That’s obviously because I am in a class-group formed by three people!!

I must admit that I had many problems trying to create the things I’ve just described! At first I didn’t realize what was the aim of Bloglines as an aggregator! After few days I realized that it is an useful thing! Every day the Blog notifier tells me “you have 315 unread items”…ehm..yes…the BBC news and the CNN are always full of comments and news!!!

As a conclusion (…I know it’s not a good thing to say!) I can declare to be quite proud of myself!!

….I hope these information could be useful for my peers and for all those people who are still trying to understand what they are supposed to do with an aggregator!!!