And if they are like me, they prefer an offline news aggregator (I use the Sage plug in for Firefox). This means I don't get my news from just Google or any other news source; I get it from free feed services like Feedster and Technorati, in addition to other sources.

Of course I am considered an "early adopter" so I would turn to these sources early. But if I am any indication of what the typical user will be in one or two years, then this is a definite threat to news aggregator services like Google News and Yahoo News. They will have to stem the flow of users defecting to other sources, including offline readers, to get their news.

So while this "customization" seems like a good idea, I think it is only the first in a long series of steps Google must take in order to keep its users and keep them happy.

For one thing, I can''t add any other news feeds to Google News. While the ability to add a keyword query which returns news results is a good first step, I think they would be better off, in a sense, to turn Google News into a true aggregation service. Which means allowing users to add multiple feeds, including competitors feeds like Yahoo and MSN.

Yahoo! has moved down this path, allowing My Yahoo! users to add any RSS feed, and I think all of the major engines need to work this way as well. Too often I think users are finding that they have to visit multiple online sources to find the information they are looking for.

For example, while I do use Google News regularly, I also use Yahoo! News, and MSN Newsbot in addition to Sage which has about 2 dozen feeds attached to it. I am an Information Junkie. I freely admit that. I need as much information as I can assimilate as it does help me do my job better.

Because you never know - there may be that gem of a news story that is found on some obscure blog that ties it all together.

And too often that is what I find - bits of information in one news story or blog can lead to more information in another, and soon I can begin to develop a better idea or theory on a new topic. This is why I (and I'm sure many of you) regularly surf through dozens of news sources, blogs and other feeds to find those tidbits of information.

My only problem now is that I need a news aggregator aggregator. A software package which can go through all my news sources, weed out duplicates and perhaps even summarize the "hot topics." This would save tons of time that I spend reading. Of course if I were to find such an application, then I would subscribe to even more feeds, forcing the application to do more weeding for me, and I would still probably spend as long reading as I do now.

Basically what I need is a Google News of feed aggregators. A system which will take all the feeds I like, scan them, index them, pull out the relevant content, remove duplicates, and return prioritized results for me. A system which would also learn, over time, what I consider most important and move it up the reading queue.

So if there are any software developers out there who have spare time (as I'm sure there are many, because if you are like our software developers you have 2 or 3 spare minutes in a day) please build this software for me. And make it intuitive. If it is browser based, or an Outlook plug in, I don't really care, as long as it could summarize and categorize my feeds for me and serve me what I want to see.

That way I could subscribe to more feeds, to read more and learn more, and then come up with more cool ideas like the one I have just presented here.

Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro.com


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