A news aggregator is a great way of scanning content from a large number of sites and sources without visiting each one in turn.

I use knode which is an NNTP newsreader for KDE. I have it set to pick up news feeds from usenet and from various news and weblog sites.

Usenet is a longstanding internet service that provides discussion forums for a huge range of interests. Most ISPs (internet service providers) support usenet. The posts to a usenet forum are replicated across the internet within minutes of being posted, providing a totally non-centralised service. An introduction to usenet can be found here .

Weblogs have come into vogue over the last couple of years (although the first weblogs started before that) as a way for individuals to publish their ideas and share them with an interested audience. The great attraction for those who belong to some kind of community of interest, professional or private, is that weblogs provide a way of sharing and developing ideas with like minded people across the globe. Some weblogs function like personal magazines, others constitute a slow evolving conversation with visitors and other weblogs.

I have found it an onerous and time consuming task to visit all those weblogs and news sites that are of interest to me. The ability to aggregate them into a newsreader is a great way of cutting down browsing time and getting more quickly to relevant information. Any site that has an XML tab or icon can be added to the newsreader. I use a software add-on called nntp//rss available as Open Source Software from http://www.methodize.org/nntprss.

Once installed, nntp//rss has a Web-based administration interface at http://127.0.0.1:7810/

New sites to aggregate can be added by copying the XML location for the desired site (copy link location).

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