Power of Aggregation
(World in our Hands )Nay, this is no way related to conquering the world or stuff like that.
I would like to draw your attention to one interesting fact that happened today. I hope all of you might have heard the news that YouTube was acquired by Google. And this " hot new " news was flashed across most news channels today. But the funniest part of all is that most guys who would have regularly kept themselves updated in the net would have come to know about this news some 2 days back. And I was one of those lucky guys. It was an interestnig news so I posted it in uit_tvm some 2 days back .
And thats the point, I am coming to. I use a software called RSSOwl which is a news aggregator. What it basically does is to, get news from around 150+ sites and present it to me in a neat e-mail like format. Now think of the time required if I have to go to these sites individually and read the news. Moreover since they are sending me the main extract , chances are that I wont miss the important stuff . But if I am reading from the site directly, all those information may not be relevant to me and sometimes , I may even miss the actual stuff - which is very uncool.
As far as the news is concerned, you get the complete picture. I will tell you how this happens. Its like this, Now imagine windows announces about the release of their new operating system Vista; I will first come to know about this news from the general news sites like ZDNet, Digg, and Netscape . I also get a first hand report from bloggers who are Microsoft or Anti-Microsoft. I also get the other side of the picture when I read feeds( news from these sites are called feeds) from Linux journal , OSI news etc. The same thing happens for any tech topic under the sun. But if we solely depend on one site for the news and if that site happens to be a supporter of one particular technology/company, then our perspective of certain technologies/companies/people will be biased - which is not very good.
If you have any doubts as to how to install and configure an aggregator(Yeah these softwares are called news aggregators) please feel free to contact me. Or you could also directly post you query in uit_tvm ( only discussions pertaining to computers are encouraged)
Thats all from me for today. You are reading blog of Justin. Meet you tomorrow same time .
Good bye.
