News aggregator

Examples of this sort of website are the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post. There are also websites like Google News and DecaPost, where aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together.
News aggregation websites started with sites like the Drudge Report, NewsNow, Andrew Breitbart and the Huffington Post, where content was still entered by humans. Newer sites such as Google News and News Clusters on the other hand are based on algorithms filling the content from a range of either automatically selected or manually added sources.


Software-based aggregation


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, Web browsers, and email programs.
The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in one browser display or desktop application. 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 end-user's computer.
As of 2011, so-called RSS-narrators have appeared, which aggregate text-only news feeds, and 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.
For example, if there are many sites you visit frequently, without RSS the only way you can find out if anything on the sites has been updated is to go to each site individually. This can take a long time. Aggregation technology helps you to integrate these websites in one browser or page that can show the new or updated information from all the sites you choose, regardless of whether the content is text, music, pictures, or video. Customers only need to find an RSS feed on the Internet and add that in their RSS reader. There are many successful on-line RSS Readers, such as My Yahoo!, Google Reader, and Feedly. There is also a variety of RSS software: Feed Demon, and RSS Reader for example. For network security, users can choose what items can be shown in their RSS readers, like title, author or others, so it can exclude spam.