In computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

How Feed Reader work?
Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or “personal newspaper.” Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update.

The content is sometimes described as being “pulled” to the subscriber, as opposed to “pushed” with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some “pushed” information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.

Aggregator features are frequently built into portal sites (such as My Yahoo! and iGoogle), modern Web browsers and email programs.

The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in a single browser display or desktop application. Such applications are also referred to as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators, news readers or search aggregators. Aggregators with podcasting capabilities can automatically download media files, such as MP3 recordings. In some cases, these can be automatically loaded onto portable media players (like iPods) when they are connected to the PC.

Recently, so-called RSS-narrators have appeared, which not only aggregate text-only news feeds, but also convert them into audio recordings for offline listening.

The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom.

Tags, Filtering on Feeds
One of the problems with news aggregators is that the volume of articles can sometimes be overwhelming, especially when the user has many Web feed subscriptions. As a solution, many feed readers allow users to tag each feed with one or more keywords which can be used to sort and filter the available articles into easily navigable categories. Another option is to import the user’s Attention Profile to filter items based on their relevance to the user’s interests.

RSS Advantage

RSS feeds are a spam-free, quick and efficient way to read news and weblogs. To get the most out of newsfeeds, you need a powerful aggregator, though, that lets you organize, search, categorize and use news items just like emails.

RSS not only available for blog or cms applications. I think all kind of application can have their own RSS Feed. Usually some application need third party applications, plugins, or mod installed. As an example, PHPBB forum need a mod for RSS Feeds.

List of Feed Agregator

For updated list of available aggregators in many platform please check here

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