In Search of a Better News Aggregator Part 1
Everyone wants to be a News Aggregator Website. I have observed a couple of them and found that they are far off from adding any value add to the reader. Most sites convert RSS feeds from websites or blogs into a page and claim to be the Aggregator of Indian BlogoSphere.
Most of the news aggregators don’t name the source of the content in their RSS feed. Some of them wants users to get into their site before seeing the source of the news item. They don’t add any value to the end user and they end up taking some of the traffic. I don’t see why the user should subscribe to these RSS feeds which carries only a excerpt of the post, when the whole post is available directly from the blogs. I am already a subscriber to all the feeds which these sites aggregate.
Yahoo Pipes can aggregate the RSS feeds by key words and they can also tag each news items. It can also eliminate the occurrence of duplicate posts on same subject or title. Here is a Yahoo Pipe which aggregates news from 5 main sources like Hindu, Business Standard etc. Such pipes can be easily configured to the user’s need. And these pipes have a RSS feed which one can subscribe in the readers.
Here are my views on news aggregators -
Startups.IN: It is a simple RSS feed aggregator website. It collects news from various blogs and distributes into on their site as well as on its RSS feed. On the RSS feed they do not share the source of the news. However the link takes directly to the source of the post. Some times the site rank better than the original source of the post.
Avashya: This is also a RSS feed aggregator website and it collects information from popular Indian Blogs and some time from other websites. They have a neatly design website. In the RSS feed they do not show the source of the post, and on clicking it takes to the Avashya website from where a user has to navigate to the original source. Too many clicks to get to the source of the post.
Startup Logic: Yet another RSS feed aggregator. They claim to aggregate 20 websites on Indian Startup subject and they update every 30 minutes. They have a preview of the news on their site and the link directly takes you to the source of the website. They do have a RSS feed for their website yet.
Indimeme: It looks like a clone of Techmeme. This is based on clustering news items and aggregating them based on popularity. The design of the site is good, but their clustering algorithm is not working as desired. Right now they are clustering dissimilar stories. And on the RSS feed they do not carry the name of the source of the post. However the links directly take you to the source of the post. This is one site which I think can be beat the competition if they could tweak the algorithm.
Let me know what you think. Also are there any other news aggregators which you think is doing a better job.
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Comments
Thanks for your review of Avashya. For your information, we will be soon changing our site design to be much more user friendly and to link directly to the articles. I hope you will check back when that happens and re-review the site.
Also you are missing out on many of the other features that other aggregators are not providing. We have categorized articles by market: “social networking”, “video”, etc.. and by financing deals: “funding”, “acquisition”. We also track companies, people and VC funds which none of the aggregators are doing as well.
Anyway, thanks again for the review and I hope you will have the chance to explore around more as we improve the site.
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