Newsmonster

I first read about Newsmonster last week on Catalogablog and made a note to give it a whirl. This weekend, I downloaded the beta version. Here are my initial thoughts.

1) I use IE as my default browser, but Newsmonster only works with Netscape or Mozilla. No big deal, I just downloaded the latest version on Netscape. Newsmonster will not work in IE because it relies on the sidebar inherent in Netscape and Mozilla.

2) The product is browser based, which is great. It is downloaded as an addon to the browser. For those that do not want a separate aggregator running on the desktop, Newsmonster is a good choice.

3) The feed titles appear on the left side of the browser. The user just needs to click on the title and the posts show up on the right side. Very easy.

4) Newsmonster will also "aggregate" sites that do not have RSS feeds. I didn't get to play with this option that much, but it seems to understand the pattern inherent in the major news sites (NYT, CNN, etc) and will process the information as if it were in RSS. Also, the first few senetences will be shown and the user has the option to expand the article and read the full text, right there in the aggregator.

5) Adding feeds is easy. You don't even have to know the RSS URL. Just plug in the web site URL and Newsmonster will find it for you via its RSS discovery tool.

6) There is a link that will display the most recent posts from all of the feeds subscribed to, but the link didn't seem to be working at the present time. I hope that it will be fixed in the near future.

7) The feeds can be exported to your PDA. I haven't tried this out yet, but it looks like a great feature (I just dont think that I have enough memory in my PDA for all the feeds I subscribe to, however).

8) After a new feed is added, it seems that you have to shut down the browser and Newsmonster, and relaunch both applications for the new feeds to appear. I could be wrong on this.

9) I love the newspaper feature in Newzcrawler, in which I can read all of my feeds in an html page created on the fly. Newsmonster doesn't have this feature, although this is probably similar to comment #6 above.

So far, I am very impressed with this aggregator and will be playing with it more in the upcoming months. For now, I'm still going to stick with Newzcrawler,