I've tried a plethora of Feed Readers, Aggregators, personal homepages, whatever you want to call them... I've tried Sage and Aggreg8 for Firefox, Google Reader, Protopage, Straw and Liferea for Linux, as well as some others back in the day on for Mac whos names I can no longer remember... but for the past year or so I've been stuck on Netvibes. For a while I thought I wanted a standalone application, but I'm not sure why. All the stuff in the reader comes from the Web anyways so integrating it into the browser seemed the best route to go, so after overcoming my attraction for the standalone app I went for Sage. I still recommend Sage to quite a few people. It's really simple and works well with Firefox, is easy to install and does autodiscovery of feeds which is a real plus for newbies who fear the orange button. But it gets a biut unweildy when you start getting hundreds of feeds going! Then I tried Netvibes. Netvibes has a fantastic drag and drop web interface, is really easy to add feeds (including autodiscovery -- autodiscovery means that you can just point it towards a web page and it will try to find out whether there is a feed associated or not.) It also includes a simple way to group my feeds with a tab interface along the top and you can also add a heap of "widgets" that have been created by the Netvibes community, including things like pulling in your Flickr photos, Del.icio.us bookmarks, weather widgets, and my new favourite - the Remember the Milk widget, etc, etc. I like also that they keep plugging away at it. A new feature appears almost every month or so and so far they've all been really useful and not gratuitous. Just today I noticed that you can now actually view the site that the post came from, from within the Netvibes interface. This is really handy because sometimes I need to go to the site to get to the article (most notably for me on Stephen Downes site) and i'm sick of opening tabs or new windows to get there. This feature allow me to switch effortlessly between the feed view and the actual site. Nice!
There's a whole other part of Netvibes that I've not really looked that far into, what they call the Netvibes Ecosystem. From what I can tell it's a place for all the third party modules, etc, but there's also an option on your feeds to be able to share them via email, IM, or some cut'n'paste code for your blog or web page which could be really useful.
It seems that even more these days i'm swamped by information that is of interest to me (RSS feeds, blogs, etc) or that i'm obliged to read (a.k.a., email.) It's getting pretty critical for those of us who spend a lot of time in here to be able to sort through this stuff, to slow this flash flood of a data flow down a bit and try to just irrigate the bits of our brains that we're currently into cultivating. To this end I spent a few hours over the weekend looking into Yahoo Pipes which is a really cool idea and one that I suspect will be a dominant geek meme next year as others jump into this space as well (there's already a few). Basically Pipes is a relatively simple GUI for creating aggregate RSS feeds; it's a bit more dynamic than that, there's some neat stuff you can do besides just combine feeds like doing content analysis on a feed for dominant words, or allow user input into a hosted Pipe to create searches across focused data sources.
So why would you need this? Well I suspect that a huge part of the literacy of networked learning will be about acquiring the skills on just how to manage your personal learning by being able to alternate between broad and narrow approaches to information. Search is generally the broadest approach but with the sheer amount of information currently available even the best boolean searches are often thwarted. Which is why establishing narrow, focused approaches to information acquisition through network protocols like RSS, Atom and then creating specific content interactions with applications like Pipes will be crucial for learners as they become more specialized in their subjects and pursuits. The interaction with content and data that the learner engages in will be in creating connections between content and data sources which for a lot of people equates to what learning is all about anyways.
These skills are not easy to explain (I've helped create two tutorials on Boolean in my life and it always confuses students) - i'm still having a hellishly hard time explaining what RSS it to most people and why it's so valuable let alone something like Pipes, but I think that it's time we start developing some basic resources on how to do these things: how to subscribe to a feed, how to tag resources in social bookmarking systems then subscribe to the feed of this tag, etc. We'll need to make all this as simple as, well... looking at a picture of a pipe.
I've got it in the pipe to do so on WikiEducator and Wikiversity as part of the Networked Learning resources ... it's just that with all this stuff to read I get so little time these days :-)
