Back in week 3 we had a look at RSS feeds, and at Newsgator - a client which enables you to collect together feeds and information from various sources. Have any of you signed up to Newsgator since? What do you think? There are also other RSS aggregators around (for example Google is developing a reader. The advantage of these readers is the way in which they manage your feeds and discard items once you have read them.
However, more recently the idea of the RSS feed reader has been combined with the personal homepage, so you can develop a page which includes your webmail inbox, a calendar, a weather forecast, and the last few posts in your selected blogs, as well as the top headlines from your chosen news/information services.
For example, one of my colleagues has introduced me to Pageflakes, which advertises itself as a personal start page on the Internet and allows you to add various "flakes" (for example a favourite radio station, a calendar) as well as RSS feeds. You can also share your page with your friends (and decide whether you want to give them editing rights) or make your page entirely public for the world to see. For example this page has been made public, so we can all follow Ian's feeds.
And I have started to use a Google homepage to bring together the sites I visit on the Internet. I've included a snapshot of my Gmail inbox and my Google calendar, some games, and some feeds from various blogs and sites: this is how I'm picking up useful news stories from Slashdot and BBC Technology. You can organise the page into various tabs to make it more manageable, and I'm so far finding it quite useful.
I'd love to hear your opinions about Newsgator, Pageflakes or Google homepage - or indeed any other RSS aggregators/personal homepages - I'd like to know what you find useful. Do set up an account with one of them just to have a go and see what you think - you might find that it saves you a lot of time!
