Vallery.net

I’ve been a long time Google Reader user. It’s great having one place that remembers exactly what you have read and what you haven’t. I had never really spent any time using a desktop feed reader as the online ones have always met my needs. Recently however I started a new job at NewsGator Technologies. We make a number of products focused around RSS including several desktop readers. In order to “eat the dog food” I began the process of moving over all of my RSS consumption to utilize the various NewsGator products.

I’ve tried using the NewsGator online service in the past however it didn’t provide me a compelling reason to switch from Google Reader. This time I was determined to figure out the best possible way to utilize the various products in a way that would make it easier and quicker for me to follow the large number of feeds I’m subscribed to (currently 62, some of which are fairly high volume). I try to limit my news reading to no more than an hour or so a day, but in that hour I have a lot of content to skim through and read. Finding a really efficient process is critical to maximizing the use of the limited time.

After tweaking with things a bit, here is my new setup:

• I’ve setup my account on the NewsGator online server (I’m using an internal to NewsGator version of the public server, but it’s the same thing).
• I’ve configured my feeds into the NewsGator server to be fetched and have the posts stored for my retrieval via one of the various clients. My feeds are organized into 4 categories (Technology, Blogs, Local News, National and International News).
• I’m using NetNewsWire on my home iMac and my MacBook Air, The iPhone version of NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon on my work laptop.

The advantages of using NetNewsWire and FeedDemon versus Google Reader are numerous. Here are some of my observations after just a few days usage:

• The biggest single advantage is offline viewing. NetNewsWire can fetch all of the content and then store it locally on my Mac to view when I’m away from an internet connection. This is also true of FeedDemon although I haven’t used that yet.
• With NetNewsWire there is no waiting for page loads of the content or images. Because everything is fetched in advance I’m only communicating with the NewsGator servers, which are very fast. All of the content is downloaded when I first sync so when I’m actually reading the posts I can just click through them with no delay. This is a huge time saver when I’m only looking at titles on 85-90% of the posts that I receive, being able to move on to the next one without waiting the 1-2 seconds it takes in Google reader to catch-up multiplied by the thousands of posts I skim in a day is certainly time saved.
• My process with Google Reader was to skim the posts for the ones that I’m actually interested in reading and then open the permalink in a new tab. This will cause the page to load in the background while I continue skimming Google Reader. This process worked well, but what works even better is the built in browser within NetNewsWire. When the permalink is clicked in NetNewsWire it is opened up in a tab right within the application. That page is opened up in a “tab” of sorts identified by a helpful thumbnail image of the resulting page. NetNewsWire keeps all of these pages open while I’m reader so that I can easily consult them without filling up my browser tabs.
• Something I haven’t taken advantage of before now are feeds that contain media rich (audio and video) downloads. Google Reader has no real way to accommodate this. In NetNewsWire however you can configure feeds to push content straight to a helper application like iTunes. This allows content distribution via RSS without the need of a central service. I look forward to more and more content providers using this approach for rich media in the future.
• I use the “clipping” functionality to save off various posts that I find interesting enough to share with others. With the online service you can configure NewsGator to publish an RSS feed of your “clippings”. I’ve setup this feed to be syndicated to my wordpress blog so anyone can go and see the stories that I found interesting.
• I can access my feeds from anywhere using my iPhone. The iPhone application has the same benefits as the desktop client and the portability of the iPhone. If only it could sync against other NewsGator servers than the public one. @brentsimmons when is this coming?
• Brent also created a list of unique features of NetNewsWire that might be helpful.

So overall I’m very happy with this solution. I went into this feeling fairly pessimistic that it would actually be an improvement over Google Reader. The end result however is that I’ve been able to shave a significant amount of time off the feed reading that I do. I guess this means I can just start subscribing to more feeds

The death of the local newspaper?

I consider myself fairly well informed. I read a number of different publications to stay up to date with current events, the latest technology, or even just a bit of celebrity gossip. I’m a busy guy, I have a lot going on and I don’t have a bunch of time to just sit around reading different websites. I, like many others, rely heavily on RSS in order to get the most of my online leisure time. I use the fantastic Google Reader application to aggregate the feeds that interest me into a single easy to sort through interface. I’m subscribed to several national and international news feeds like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. I’ve got feeds for a couple of the social news websites like Digg and Reddit. I’ve got a few feeds for Google News searches on topics that interest me. Lastly, I’ve got a few blogs and other miscellaneous feeds. I can quickly scan the headlines and read an article if it is of actual interest to me. All of this gets me fairly well informed on what is going on in the nation, and in the world. That is the problem….

You see, a lot goes on that is relevant to me, and that I would be very interested in knowing, but I’m completely clueless about it. The world around me, around where I live, isn’t well represented online. I want to be able to access my local news just like I access the rest of my news. I want to be informed about what is going on without spending unnecessary time on it.

I live just outside a moderately sized city in Northern Colorado called Longmont. We have a local newspaper called The Daily Times Call that covers local current events. The newspaper represents Longmont as well as several of the smaller communities around Longmont like the one I live in called Firestone. According to the wikipedia article on Longmont, as of 2005 it has about 76k residents and 26k households. If you include the surrounding communities my best guess would be that the newspaper could potentially reach as many as 40k homes. I have no clue how many subscribers have, but it would certainly be a small subset of that. The Times Call has always been a good newspaper. I’ve been a subscriber on and off over the years. I even delivered papers for them when I was much younger. My problem with the Times Call is that my options are fairly limited on actually getting the news from them. Today, it really breaks down to either of the following:

1) Subscribe to the dead tree version of the newspaper. There are lots of reasons why this isn’t ideal for me, and I would guess a lot of folks like me. The print version is a huge waste of paper. It takes a significantly longer time to sort through the articles. Using an RSS reader I can glance over 250 stories and read the ones of interest before I could even get through the first section of the print version. The print version is largely ad supported which just adds more heft to its size. Most importantly however is that the print version isn’t always available when I want to read the news. I frequently read the news at work, at home, or on my mobile device. It is really just a matter of whenever I can grab a free minute.

2) Read the news on their website. The downsides of this are that their page has a relatively poor user interface. It is loaded down heavily with advertisements. The biggest downside is that I have to remember to go check it. Google Reader is routine for me, it’s my source of news and information. To get the local news from the Times Call website, it requires an extra step of loading up a separate page trying to make heads or tales of the articles they have on their site.

Over the years I’ve done both methods. I gave up on the dead tree version a couple years ago in preference to their website. Up until just earlier this year they didn’t even publish most of their local stories on their website. The only thing up there would be the top couple of lead articles. These problems aren’t unique to the Times Call either. I’m sure there are some exceptions out there, but when I did a casual survey of several other local newspapers throughout Colorado I found a similar experience.

If I could dream up a solution to these problems it would be content created by individual journalists, paid journalists, and amateur bloggers alike. The content would be well organized and tagged not only for category or type but also for geography. A social network, or digg/reddit like approach would be used to identify popular stories for the masses but that content wouldn’t drown out the local information that might not have as much of a mass appeal.

Until my news and information utopia exists I need to come up with a real interim solution. I’ve contacted the Times Call on several occasions asking, begging, for RSS on their website. My emails seem to have fallen on deaf ears as I have never received a response. I assume that they are tied to an old and outdated business model and are afraid to move into the modern age. They keep tight control over the methods in which their content is viewed so they can pump the pages full of ads. I respect that, I understand that is currently their way of making the web profitable. I also understand that this isn’t the business model of the future. Content like theirs is only valuable if they have an audience to read it. Increasingly so, folks are turning to other methods to become informed. Technologies like RSS are disruptive, game changing. They empower users to be in control, not the publishers. The Times Call is the best there is for covering news about Longmont, Colorado but the last place I would turn for news about the war in Iraq. They don’t have the resources to provide quality coverage of national and international topics of interest. Each news source has it’s place and as those niches are carved out each publication will have it’s own following.

The Times Call, and local newspapers like it all across the country, need to do what they do best. Provide great coverage about what is going on in our communities. They need to provide that coverage in ways that are accessible to everyone. From folks like my Dad, who I don’t think I could even explain to him what an RSS feed is let alone get him to use one. To folks like me, and many of my peers and friends who want to make the most of our busy lives but still be informed about the communities we live in. If the local newspapers don’t adopt a different business model for the web, they will continue to see their subscriber base shrink. I’m happy to pay online subscription fees for access to quality content. I know nobody works for free and someone has to pay the bills. Let me pay the Times Call $10 a month for access to their RSS feed, hopefully advertisement free. If that doesn’t work, just publish the article title and a synopsis and force the user to access your website to read an article they are interested in. At least this way I know what is on your site and if I want to read it I’ll be subjected to all of your advertisements.

Since neither of these solutions have happened so far, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. I created an application that harvests the article contents from the Times Call website and then redistributes it in RSS format. It took me all of a couple hours to put this together and test it. It is working great and myself along with several of my friends are now using it. While this doesn’t help most people out there, if you happen to live in and around Longmont and want to access the Times Call in RSS format you can get the feed at http://vallery.net/timescall.xml.

Happy reading!