I’m looking for a good news aggregator for my desktop (Win 7) that not only allows me to add topics, but more importantly, allows me to completely remove topics from the feed. I want to tell it to exclude all sports, entertainment gossip, and all things related to royal nitwits. I’d also like to add keywords or other topics as the infotainment industry latches onto them, so I can exclude the inane coverage of the Zimmermans, Boston bombers, etc. once the main stories have broke.
Is that so hard? Google seems to almost do it, but while I can easily add topics, I can’t find any way of removing them (I just spent a frustrating block of time trying to rid myself of the focus on some English tart’s twat). Anyone know if yahoo or other service has that feature?
You can start from a regular RSS reader, whichever one you prefer, and add feeds from your favorite news source-- only the topics you’re interested in. (For example, here’s CNN’s list.)
For your keyword requirement, you can set up saved Google Alert on the keyword. You can request either only News, or the entire indexed web. Note: these results are emailed, so they won’t be aggregated with the rest of the RSS feeds. I’m not sure if that’s a deal-breaker for you or not.
To exclude keywords… you’ll have to find a RSS reader that supports that feature, if one exists. Sorry, I don’t know of one off the top of my head.
As I read this I see over 200 people have read the thread, but only one response. This lead me to wonder if like me there are huge number of people who have the same problem and have no idea what the answer is.
Blakeyrt the problem with RSS feeds is duplication. If you have both Ars Technica and Slashdot on an RSS reader (like I do) there is a great deal of duplication between the two. The more sources you have the duplication you get. The RSS reader is good for low volume blogs though.
The Google News approach solves this problem (because it combines the duplicate posts under one entry) but it has all the problems the OP mentions.
So how do people here deal with these problems?
I guess I just deal with it. If I see the same article twice from two different sources in my RSS reader, I just hit “skip and mark as read” on the second one.
I dunno; maybe there’s an idea for a new product here.