phil ringnalda

Ev:

This relates to a post I made a while back challenging Dave’s argument that it’s not an aggregator unless it mixes the content sources up on a single page. Phil seems to agree (with Dave).

Oops. I didn’t really quite mean to agree that you shouldn’t be allowed to use the word aggregator unless you stew together items from different sources, just that doing it in a personal RSS reader seems to me to have a more significant effect than you might expect. “Aggregator” is the only word I have for that style of displaying RSS items.

Russ Beattie:

He also posts to Phil who says that a newsreader isn’t as nice as an integrated aggregator like in Radio.

I wasn’t even thinking about NNTP, I just didn’t have any other word to refer to RSS readers that display all the items from one feed together, generally with a list of feeds on the left side, headlines at the top, content at the bottom, like most Usenet readers I’ve used did, last time I checked (it’s been a while).

I’d like to have some less wordy way to say “Personal RSS reader which displays items in reverse chronological order irrespective of the original feed” and “Personal RSS reader which displays items divided by feed, possibly keeping track of which items you’ve seen before or maybe not”, but Dave’s already lost the battle to keep the word aggregator (to most people, an aggregator is any program which reads RSS, no matter what it does with it), and newsreader is really too easy to confuse with a Usenet reader.

Then Eric Tilton tells me that Brent was way ahead of me, and before I even realized that what I really want is a per-feed choice between stew and steak, NetNewsWire was doing it.

I will not. I will not buy another computer just to run one app. At least, I don’t think I will.