Al Delgado reports on another Web aggregator (FeedMe), but the best news is that it appears Bloglines and MyWireService seem to be intent on keeping their services free to educators. I’ve been singing Bloglines’ praises for a while now. It’s all I use, and I use it primarily because it’s the most convenient aggregator there is. (I’ve tried MyWireService too but find it too clunky. Bloglines two paned window and bookmarking or save-for-later ability makes it a clearly better choice.)
Anyway, I’ve been getting ready to intro the RSS concept to a small audience at my school, and my students are going to be using Bloglines when I get them in November and February. But what I want to start doing is throwing some feeds out there from the library page, the tech page and others, and then grow the list by adding featured blogumnists to review books and movies and student life and sports and whatever else. I really want to work with the newspaper kids to start cranking out content like that and marketing it through the use of the aggregator. I can already picture the menu page or RSS feeds for our school…how cool that’s going to be.
And then, of course, the next step is parents. If I have anything to say about it, the listserv we have currently will fizzle out into obscurity and I’ll have the most aggregating set of parents in the country by the end of the year…well, maybe a little longer. I’ll give them support for NY Times feeds and Seattle Post Intellegencer and Rolling Stone and more as they come on line. Heck, I’ll start an RSS site just for them that they can aggregate and read to become better aggregators. I swear if 50% of what I have in my head becomes a reality…
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “too clunky” about MyWireService?
Oh, and MyWireService also has a save feature, always has. 😉
Hi Troy…MyWireService just does not seem as intuitive as Bloglines. I know it took me just a couple of seconds to start adding sites at Bloglines whereas I can’t tell where to do that from the MWS page. From what I can tell, it’s four clicks from the homepage. (I just now found the little Add a news Source link, but I can’t tell if that’s for your list or mine…) Also, I like having the list of feeds clickable on the right to show in the left frame. Sometimes I just want to read certain people instead of every post. My students and teachers need simple, and every one that I’ve shown Bloglines to pretty much figures it out with just a basic understanding of what a feed is and how it works.
Thanks for the feedback. MyWireService’s aim is to appeal to novices, not people who know what RSS is. It sounds like you’ve shown it to people who know what RSS is and/or expect a traditional aggregator. I would agree that Bloglines makes sense to those people, but MyWireService users don’t know or care about RSS or XML (or URLs for that matter).
Also, MWS has a “traditional aggregator” view too (click “View sources” in each of your sections) but again, we have found that novice users just don’t understand that type of view and so it is deprecated in favor of a view that simply shows you the latest news. The traditional aggregator view is there to allow you to go straight to a feed.
I hope you allow your students and teachers to choose between Bloglines and MWS and other aggregators. At the very least, please keep an eye on MWS; I think you’ll be happy with some innovative things we’re going to be adding in the near future. 🙂
I appreciate your efforts and input, Troy, and I wish you the best with MWS. FYI, the people who I have shown and used Bloglines with do NOT know RSS and have no expectations, yet with about a minute of instruction they have picked it up. I have to tell you from my perspective on the ease of use issue there is no comparison.