News aggregator

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or personal newspaper.

By 2011, so-called RSS narrators appeared, which aggregated text-only news feeds, and converted them into audio recordings for offline listening.

"[4] "In 2005, major players in the web browser market started integrating the technology directly into their products, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari."

[6] For instance, Google News gathers and publishes material independent of customers' needs while Awasu[7] is created as an individual RSS tool to control and collect information according to clients' criteria.

There are a variety of software applications and components available to collect, format, translate, and republish XML feeds, a demonstration of presentation-independent data.

[13] More advanced methods of aggregating feeds are provided via Ajax coding techniques and XML components called web widgets.

Ranging from full-fledged applications to small fragments of source code that can be integrated into larger programs, they allow users to aggregate OPML files, email services, documents, or feeds into one interface.

Software aggregators can also take the form of news tickers which scroll feeds like ticker tape, alerters that display updates in windows as they are refreshed, web browser macro tools or as smaller components (sometimes called plugins or extensions), which can integrate feeds into the operating system or software applications such as a web browser.

Social news aggregators collect the most popular stories on the Internet, selected, edited, and proposed by a wide range of people.

A simple example is comparing media coverage of a topic in two countries, which are in (armed) conflict with another: one can easily imagine that news outlets, particularly if state-controlled, will report differently or even contrarily on the same events (for instance, the Russo-Ukrainian War).

While media bias and framing have been subject to manual research for a couple of decades in the social sciences, only recently have automated methods and systems been proposed to analyze and show such differences.

"Integrated infrastructure that will allow the user to capture, store, semantically index, categorize and retrieve multimedia, and multilingual digital content across different sources – TV, radio, music, web, etc.

[17] Several BitTorrent client software applications such as Azureus and μTorrent have added the ability to broadcatch torrents of distributed multimedia through the aggregation of web feeds.

"[21] However, it has been pointed out that in order to push the content RSS should be user-friendly to ensure[22] proactive interaction so that the user can remain engaged without feeling "trapped", good design to avoid being overwhelmed by stale data, and optimization for both desktop and mobile use.

RSS has a positive impact on marketing since it contributes to better search engine rankings, to building and maintaining brand awareness, and increasing site traffic.

The user interface of the feed reader Tiny Tiny RSS
The common web feed icon