Rodent Regatta

Several people are talking about aggregators right now. I’ve enjoyed the linkages that exist between Radio Userland’s ”built-in” aggregator and the text entry box of the weblog tool. It’s nice to wake up to all of the sites you want to read nicely aggregated in one place.
It’s also nice to be able to post from those aggregated stories by merely ”pressing buttons.” There’s very little cut, copy and paste required. However, there are drawbacks. First, on my system, some sites don’t come through the aggregator in a timely way. Further, the Radio Userland aggregator provides that linkage only to its own weblog tool.
The perfect aggregator would be independent of the weblog tools, but permit a ”linkage” to be established that facilitates posting. I’ve been playing with Amphetadesk. It doesn’t like some of the RSS feeds that I’ve been getting via Radio Userland. It’s unclear at this point what’s wrong with those feeds. Examples include prominent sites like: www.boingboing.net and www.bitworking.org. This last site actually causes my copy of Amphetadesk to perform an abend!
The other gripe I have about the Amphetadesk aggregation screen is the absence of any dates and times for the posts. One of these days the perfect tool will arrive!

Jeremy Zawodny Dreams of the Perfect RSS Aggregator. He may be giving Radio’s aggregator short shrift, but Jeremy has done a good job of breaking down several approaches to RSS aggregation and providing his own wishlist:

I’m on a quest to find the perfect RSS aggregator…. I’m thinking of a server-based process that can gather all the data and give it to me in one of several ways. Maybe I can just point my browser at it and catch up on the newsjust like AmphetaDesk. That’s great for when I’m on-line and in a surfing mood. I’d like it to do RSS auto-discovery. I’d like the option of having updates sent to me via e-mail and possibly instant-messenger. Heck, I’d like to be able to subscribe via e-mail or IM as well…. Anyone know of such a beast? Sounds like it’d be a fun project to build. [Radio Free Blogistan]