Periscope concentrates on mainstream online news portals and sites like BBC News, the Wallstreet Journal, the Guardian, Business Week or the Washington Post. This means that it is best suited for Internet users who regularly read news on at least one of those online news sites. If you favor independent sites, smaller newspapers or niche sites then you won’t find much use in the extension as it does not provide links to related news posts in this case. The available site pool exceeds 10,000 according to the developers.

After you have installed the extension in your favorite browser, or installed an app for your phone, you will see a news bar at the top of supported news portals that links to related articles.

The toolbar displays the news magazine or site name only, and not the actual title of the related article that you will find on that site. That’s an oversight as you may run into the same article or an unrelated article on another site.

You can however expand the toolbar to display additional news sources and images on the screen. It can take a few moments before the toolbar is displayed on a page. This should not be a big usability issue considering that most users will start reading the news on the original site first before they start being interested in additional coverage.

Internet users who do not want to install an extension for that, can access the database of sites on the News360 website as well.

Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari users find download links on the official website. Everyone else finds links to the mobile app versions of the application and the web based version there as well.

FeedBeater is an online service that can create RSS feeds or email alerts for any webpage on the Internet (that does not require login or is otherwise protected).

In the best case, all you need to do is to visit the FeedBeater website, enter the domain name or page url that you want to receive updates for, and select if you want RSS feed updates or email alerts.

Sometimes though this may not work sufficiently well, for instance if changes are detected that are not of interest or if changes are not detected by the site’s script. You can make use of the advanced options in this case.

Advanced options load a view of the website in the browser. You have two options to configure custom notifications. The first allows you to add keywords that the page should have or not have. The second to specify an area on the web page that is of importance to you. Changes in that area will then be reported while changes to other areas of the site won’t.

Both options can be used to fine tune the notification settings of the RSS feed creation and email alert option.

The advanced option needs to be selected in most cases to make sure that updates are reported correctly. The default parser for instance displayed old posts as RSS feed updates on Ghacks.net. The advanced options allowed me to customize the selection and correct that issue. Users need to be aware that they need to supply an email address to the service if they use the advanced configuration options.

Interested users can check out FeedBeater here. Alternatives are Dapper, Feed43 or Feedity to create RSS feeds.

Are you using another service to create RSS feeds for pages that do not offer one by default?

Update: The FeedBeater service is no longer available. Please use one of the alternatives listed at the end of the article.

One important note to keep in mind is that NewsSquares does not require access to a bunch of information on your computer. The app will utilize information it takes from the information you share on Google and at goo.gl, the company’s link shortener, and ajax.googleapis.com, which is a website related to developer tools for Chrome (so no problem there). This makes it safer than those nasty apps that require access to everything you do simply to keep you updated with the weather or something like that.

To try it out, simply follow this link to the Google app store and download the app onto your computer. Chrome automatically handles the installation behind the curtain, and in seconds the app will be sitting in your browser waiting to be utilized.

Chrome does not technically allow the developers of NewsSquares, a small app company called Rocket-in-Bottle, to create a toolbar launch button for their product, nor do they allow any other app producer to do so. As such, you can access NewsSquares by opening a new tab. You should see the application in the Apps section of the new tab near the top of the content area. To get started, click that button and you should be transported to the setup area.

If you are logged in with your Google account the app will automatically accept that login, although you can tell it to take a different account name and password on the opening screen if you wish. From the primary NewsSquares page, which gives you a preview of its power with default content, click the large +Add button on the left of the screen to begin adding new subscriptions to your “news wall” and getting the content more in line with your interests. A window will then appear that allows you to search through a host of common content options, including a search option to find feeds that NewsSquares does not feature.

As you choose the feeds you want, remember that you have to get in there and remove the default ones you do not. You can do this by clicking the Manage button at the top of that same subscriptions window. Once finished, step back to the news wall and survey what you have created.

NewsSquares does indeed offer more than a traditional RSS news consolidation point. It is easy to see that it is far more attractive visually than most, but clicking on one of your new squares shows even more. As news sites are rarely about simple single news feeds, clicking on each square brings up other news items that appear along the bottom of the screen, providing a handy way to search abbreviated news from your news wall.

There are a lot of RSS consolidation tools out there, and everyone is looking for something different in the one they use. NewsSquares provides a very pretty way to go about sorting through your news feeds in a well-organized and visually appealing way. If you are looking for a new feed reader, it is probably a good one to take for a spin.

More and more, people are turning to social media both to see what’s happening in the world and to get commentary on it. Because it is real-time, you can often get the news faster from Twitter than you can by waiting for the 6:00 news, your daily newspaper or even by turning to your local 24-hour news station. There may be a story trending on Twitter before the media even hear about it.

Twitter set traffic records the night Osama was killed. From 10:45 to 02:20 ET on May 2, there were an average of 3000 tweets per second about Osama. The traffic peaked when President Obama addressed the American public with around 5100 tweets per second. This was not a traffic record in terms of numbers, but it is a record in terms of sustained volume of traffic. While people may have been watching the speech on TV, they were clearly discussing what they heard as well.

Perhaps the most interesting role played by social media in the way we get news now is the local, eye-witness view. Never before have we been able to hear what’s happening from someone who is being directly impacted by what’s going on, in real time. Videos of the Japanese tsunami were on YouTube hours after the event. These were taken by local people, not reporters paid by the big networks.

This is why it’s so interesting to read the Twitter feed of 33 year old Sohaib Athar, a computer programmer living in Abbottabad. Being a techy, of course when the planes started flying over, he tweeted about it. By the time it became clear what was going on, he’d acquired quite a following. As he says himself, he’s the person that live blogged the death of Osama bin Laden without knowing about it. He and maybe one or two others are the eye-witness view of Osama’s death that would not have been possible even a few years ago.

Now, what do the powers that be think of the new way we get and talk about our news? Well, they seem to be using the social networks as much as we are. They’re using them to get a pulse on public opinion. Often, you’ll even get a report on what’s being said on the Twitter feed alongside the reporter’s coverage. As soon as Athar realized what he was blogging, he knew that the media want to know all about it. He had media contacting him even before it became clear what he was blogging. Now, he himself is part of the story.

What do the newsmakers think? Well, the smart ones have jumped on board. Everyone from the Pope to the Queen has a Twitter feed and a YouTube channel. Have you checked out the White House Flickr feed? There are numerous pictures posted of the President in meetings concerning the Osama raid.

Social networks have changed the way we get and interact with the major news of the day. Long, long gone are the days when we sit down to watch the 6:00 news to find out what’s going on in our world. Now, our news is real-time and always somehow close to home. It’s one effect of the new global village, I suppose. Looking at what happened online surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden highlights the change in thinking as news consumption gets less centralized and more personal.

So, where were you when you heard about Osama bin Laden? How did you hear? Did you run to the TV or to Twitter? Did you have both going? How do you get your news nowadays?

I quit after the overhyped Unreal Tournament successor came out, which turned UT from a competitive team game into soulless eye candy. E-Sports on the other hand thrived and became mainstream eventually.

BlizzTV is an all-in one E-Sports news app. The desktop application pulls news and media from various sources on the Internet and displays those in the application interface.

Listed in the last beta version are Feeds, Videos, Events, Podcasts, BlizzBlues and Streams. The name indicates it already, most of the pre-configured streams are linked to Blizzard and its popular franchises Warcraft and Starcraft. The application is on the other hand customizable, more about that after the break.

The software updates its information regularly, and indicates additions and news with a small mail icon and a system sound.

Lets take a look at the categories before we delve into the options.

• Events – List today’s, upcoming and past Blizzard game events. This includes Battlenet games, leagues and cups.
• Feeds – News feeds from Blizzard sites and third party sites, only titles are readable, articles open in the default web browser.
• Videos – Youtube videos of
  Blizzard games, play directly in the application.
• Blizzblues – Blues are official Blizzard employees in the Blizzard game forums. Their latest posts are listed here.
• Podcasts – Audio news and reports that play directly in the application window.
• Streams – Live game streams are linked here.

You are probably thinking right now why you should bother with the application if you do not play any Blizzard games. The answer is customization. Several news streams can be customized to suite your gaming preferences.

The categories Videos, Podcasts, Streams and Feeds can be customized. Video providers can be added from Youtube or BlipTV. A click on Catalog displays a list of available options including the World Cyber Games, Intel Extreme Masters or ESL.tv. These providers are then added to the video listing and you will be informed about updates via the application’s notification system.

It is similarly possible to add feeds, podcasts or streams to the program. All sections offer a catalog button that lists pre-selected items and options to add custom feeds, streams and podcasts manually.

Events and the BlizzBlues category cannot be modified but disabled if they are not needed.

BlizzTV is a godsend for Blizzard gamers, especially those who follow E-Sports or play actively in clans and teams that compete in leagues or events.

Gamers who do not play Blizzard games on the other hand need to customize the program before it becomes useful. It still has some strong points, but most feed readers and news applications can handle those as well.

BlizzTV is currently offered as a beta version for Windows. The program requires the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed on the system. It will launch the installers if those programs are missing on the system.

For Linux there are plenty of possible RSS feed readers. One of my favorite readers is Liferea. Liferea is a feed aggregator for Gtk/GNOME that is fast, stable, works with most feeds, and takes up very few precious CPU cycles. And Liferea offers numerous features other, simpler, RSS feed readers do not have. In this article you will be introduced to this outstanding aggregator tool for the Linux desktop.

Features

Liferea offers the following features:

• Easy subscription addition/management.
• Bookmark using sites like Zurpy.
• Fast.
• Easy to use email-like thread pane.
• Import/Export of feeds.
• Script manager.
• Subscribe to your Google mail feed.
• and much more!

Installation

Liferea is very simple to install on any modern Linux distribution. In Ubuntu 9.10 you can open up the Software Center, do a search for “liferea” (no quotes), and install. The same steps can be followed with Synaptic. If you are using a Fedora-like distribution you can open up a terminal and issue the command (as the root user):

yum install liferea

Once installed you will find the Liferea menu entry in your Internet sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Using Liferea

Figure 1

When you first fire up Liferea (see Figure 1) you will notice a number of already configured feeds for your enjoyment. Reading an entry from one of the pre-configured feeds is simple:

1. Click on the feed from the right pane.
2. Click on a story in the upper right pane.
3. Read the story in the lower right pane.

If, within the story, there is a link or comments you want to read you only need click on the Comments link or the url link within the article. The nice thing about Liferea is that you can read the entire story from within the application, so no other application is necessary. You are not just given a snippet of the article to preview.

Adding a new feed source

Of course you will most likely want add your own feed sources. Liferea has made this simple as well. Follow these steps:

Figure 2

1. Click the “New Subscriptions” button.
2. Enter the address of the source in the resulting new window (see Figure 2).
3. Click OK

That’s it. Now you will have noticed the Advanced button in the New Subscription window. You will want to go to the advanced configuration options if you need to:

• Change the source type from URL to either Command or Local file.
• Use a proxy.
• Use a conversion filter.

Other than that, just entering the source address is all you need.

Google

As I mentioned earlier, you can also subscribe to your Google mail. To do this follow these steps:

1. Click the New Subscription button.
2. Enter https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom as the source.
3. Click OK.

When prompted enter your Google username/password. Once authenticated Liferea will download your Gmail as a feed.

If you want to add your Google Reader feeds you can do this as well. Follow these steps:

1. Right click an empty spot in the left pane and select New.
2. From the resulting menu select “New Source”.
3. From the Source Selection window choose Google Reader.
4. Click OK.
5. When prompted enter your Google account username and password.
6. Click OK.

The Google feed will automatically update for you, but might take a bit of time to update depending upon how many feeds you are subscribed to with Google Reader.

Final thoughts

Liferea is one of the best RSS solutions available for the Linux desktop. Not only is it easy to use, it’s flexible enough to satisfy even the more critical users.

New iPhone Safari Bug Could Drive Your Bills Through The Roof

It has been a while since we have seen a major bug in Safari on the iPhone that users could themselves trip. So imagine our intrigue when we came across this bug. Apparently, if the user visits a site that uses Motion-JPEG (a format used mainly by security cameras) and then closes Safari – Safari continues to run in the background and continues to feed that stream into your iPhone.

The user is not notified of this in anyway and at the end of the day, you could end up with huge data bills or over usage charges. [read]

More Macs Online After The Windows 7 Launch

This might seem a bit hard to digest but it seems like the truth. We now have more Macs online  after Windows 7 has been released. In fact, Windows’ share of the Internet is on the decline. This could get interesting. [read]

Snow Leopard Update To Block Atom

Looks the latest build kernels of Mac OS 10.6.2 lacks support for Intel’s Atom. While the intention on Apple’s part is not entirely clear but we may be looking at yet another cat and mouse game here after the current Palm Pre sync thing.

If this build goes live, then netbook hackintosh makers will face a pretty challenging situation where there is no built in support for Atom. Since removing the support does not really contribute to the further streamlining of the Mac OS, blocking hackintosh makers seems like the logical intention here.

It would make sense too, with Apple trying to convert as many people has possible from the PC side of things. However, they won’t be able to keep at it for that long because you can bet that hackers on the case already and it won’t take them long.

Endless Racing Game For iPhone

I have not tried out the endless racing game but the video sure looks fun. If you are up for a simple racing that reminds of the old days, this one might be just the thing you are looking for. [read]

SquareSpace App Goes Live On The App Store

The popular hosted web-service called SquareSpace finally has its own iPhone. If you have an account over at SquareSpace, you will be able to access it securely over the app. The app does not take you through the website. It is a self-contained thing that is directly hooked up with the SquareSpace service and it lets you see everything about your website. You can see the stats, post on your blog, edit your blog, etc. [read]

Wadia’s High-End Dock For The iPod

Wadia has a high-end in audio and video solution for the the iPod, sort of. They have an iPod dock called the 170iTransport. Once you plug in your iPod, the device will act as a media server. It can stream your iPod digital output over an S/PDIF co-axial cable and it also has component video for all your movies. Going for $380, this might be a nice addition to your home theatre rig. Of  course, the quality will be as good as the original files, which will likely be compressed. [read]

Orange To Offer The iPhone In the UK From Nov 10, Bans Media Streaming Apps

Orange has declared that they will start selling the iPhone from November 10. But there is a problem here. [read]

It seems that Orange’s terms and conditions dictate that you cannot use your iPhone for other activities. These activities include making using the phone as a modem, using non-Orange Internet-based streaming services, VoIP and more. That means you will not be able to use apps like Spotify, YouTube, AudioBoo, etc. – all of which use Internet-based media streaming to deliver content on demand.

But Orange has clarified on BBC that iPhone users will be allowed to use these apps as long as they are within their monthly usage limits. I really hope they stick to that, because you will be signing the contract. [read]

iPhone OS 3.1.2 Unlock Coming On Nov 4^th, Unlock iPhone 3GS and More

It has been cracked folks!

Come November 4^th, i.e. tomorrow, you will be able to unlock your iPhone 3GS and other devices that are running iPhone OS 3.1.2. The hacker who made cracks of the previous iPhone OS versions has done it again. The crack is coming as blacksn0w  from Geohot. [read]

Fast Flip combines the paged accessibility of print magazines with the near real-time refresh period of online magazines. The number of sources that have been added to Google Page Flip reads like a who is who of the most popular online news portals including the New York Times, BBC, Business Week or the Washington Post.

Several categories are available on the Google Fast Flip website including Science and Technology, Politics, Business and Sports.

A click on any individual article that is being displayed on the Google Fast Flip website is loading the interface for the individual news source. It is furthermore possible to access the categories directly which will combine the news of all news sources in that category.

Google Fast Flip basically embeds the article that has been published on the website of the news portal in their interface with options to “flip” to the next article in line just like in any print magazine. A side menu on the right displays thumbnails of the articles next in line with the option to open one of them with a mouse click.

The only other options currently provided next to the ones described are to email articles and to “like” the article which requires a Google account.

Google Fast Flip could be an interesting option for users who access the Internet from devices with smaller screens, e.g. tablet PCs, netbooks or smart phones.

Interested users can head over to the Google Labs website to take Google Fast Flip for a test drive.

Update: Google Fast Flip has been discontinued by Google. The service is no longer available.

FeedStitch offers multiple third-party ways of logging into the service including using Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Open ID and AOL. Once logged in it is possible to paste RSS feed urls into the form to add them into groups. Groups are made up of multiple RSS news feeds and other news sources and provide access to a single RSS news feed url or Json item.

The other news sources that can be added in addition to news feeds are Twitter (either by username or Twitter search), Flickr, Delicious, Github and Tumblr. A new url is created for each new group that gets created by the user. Each group can be accessed directly in the web browser or in a feed reader. It is also possible to customize the url in the form http://feedstitch.com/groupname/.

FeedStitch is a nice service for users who want to quickly combine multiple RSS feeds into one especially if they have an account at one of the services that can be used to log into FeedStitch.

It basically allows the visitor to enter a search term in their form on top to compute a relationship network that centers around that search term. It is possible to adjust several sliders to concentrate on news centering around people, keywords, cities, companies or organizations. Between 0 and 20 nodes can be added per slider.

The items are put into relation with each other centering around the main keyword. Relations are displayed with lines that are connecting the nodes. Hovering the mouse over a node or line will display an overlay window with information about the node or the relation between two nodes.

The news of the overlays are very extensive with direct textual and visual information and multiple links to related news articles.

It is furthermore possible to set a date range for the collected news. The visitor can pick from the three default values 7 days, 4 weeks and 6 months or define a custom date range.

The network relationship search can be accessed by clicking on the Network link above the search form on top of the homepage. The search form will suggest related keywords much like Google’s suggest feature which can be helpful in identifying related keywords.

A userscript compatible browser is needed for the new interface theme to work. Long time users of Google Reader will need a few minutes before they grow accustomed to the changes. Many would call them drastic and some might say that it is to minimalistic.

At its ore lies a CSS file that can be used to customize the display further to suit individual needs. The main advantage of this userscript is that it puts the focus on the feed items by removing unnecessary buttons and items in Google Reader.

Helvetireader is a project in development. Interested users can follow the development process on the project’s homepage or on Twitter.

I usually fired up Google Reader and kept it open all the time to read new RSS feeds. The problem with that approach was that this meant that I was always logged into my Google account. The Google account was used for other Google services as well. Having read about Gmail and Google vulnerabilities before I decided that it would be best to move from Google Reader to another client to prevent that the account data would fall into the wrong hands. Yes, the likelihood was not very high but the chance existed.

Newzie was one of the first RSS readers that I evaluated and I immediately liked it. It was easy to import the opml file from Google Reader into Newzie so that all of the subscribed feeds would be available in the new RSS reader as well.

The default display mode of this RSS reader is to sort feeds by the time they were last updated with the most recently updated feeds at the top of the list. This view can be changed to a folder mode that simply lists all feeds alphabetically in their folders. The order of the feeds can be changed and the visibility of the complete menu can be toggled to increase screen size for the actual news items.

The RSS feeds are displayed in their own browser-like interface. A click on a title or link will load that link in a new tab in the Newzie interface. This is actually one of my complaints that I have with the RSS reader. I would have preferred that links would open in the default browser instead but I guess many users will think that reading them right in the RSS reader might be the more comfortable way. There is actually an option to load the link externally but it is hidden in a submenu.

The main interface provides access to three view modes:

Report View: Will only display new feed items filling out the complete interface
List View: Will divide the main interface into an upper panel that is displaying the RSS items and a lower panel that is displaying the contents of the active item.
List View 2: Like the first Live View only that the contents are divided vertically and that the RSS items are sorted by date

All posts can be marked read, deleted, flagged or copied / moved.

One interesting feature of Newzie is the ability to look at the news items of a particular feed by hovering the mouse over the feed. This makes it possible to quickly look at new items that have been posted without having to actually load the feed.

New items can be filtered right from the main interface using so called on-the-fly filtering. Commands like title=name would list all posts with name being part of their titles. Other filters make it possible to view only posts that have been updated before, at or after a certain period in time, posts that have been posted in a specific folder or posts that have a certain priority associated with them.

There is also a second interesting option which makes it possible to create so called virtual channels which apply word filters to RSS feeds. It would be possible to create a virtual channel that would contain all posts that would contain “portable software” in the body. It is currently only possible to apply those filters to the title, body or all of the news item. These filters can be combined by using AND or OR relations. It would be nice to see support for other information like author or tags added to the filter in the future.

Newzie offers another interesting related feature. It can monitor websites even if they do not offer an RSS feed. It can monitor any website for any kind of changes or specific changes. Specific changes can be words, text segments, links or images. Those monitored websites would then be added to the same menu containing the RSS feeds.

Other features Newzie is offering:

• Statistics
• Newsticker
• Monitoring IE favorites
• Feed priorities

A few more options to customize the RSS reader would be helpful. This would include the option to load links in the default web browser by default, an option to always display only the titles of the items in the overview and the ability to filter additional variables like author or tags.

A user of Feedrinse may add up to 500 feeds to the service and group those feeds in different channels. He can do so by adding them manually in a web form or importing a opml file that contains a list of feeds. The filters can then be configured for feeds individually or for every channel.

The filter options can be used to allow or disallow feed items that do or do not contain specified posts, titles, bodies, tags or authors with a certain string. It could for instance be set to only include feed items that have been written by a specific author or that have been tagged with a certain keyword.

A new RSS feed link will be created that contains only those items that have passed the filter. Users who need more options to filter and customize feeds should take a look at Yahoo Pipes instead.

These news feeds can then be subscribed to in any news reader so that the user can read incoming emails in his news reader instead of his email client. Why would someone want to do that? The only practical issue that came to mind was to publish the news feed on a website so that multiple users would have access to the email. It could also be interesting for situations where multiple users need read access to email accounts but that’s configurable in mail clients as well.

There is not really a reason to use this service independently, at least none that we could think of while reviewing it. Many users will (rightfully) dislike the fact that they have to enter the data of their email account on the website to enable the service. Another aspect is that the latest news entry on the company’s blog dates back to last year. The project feels abandoned.

Can you think of another reason why someone would want to forward email to RSS?

But when it comes to feeds no such thing existed. You could visit the website whenever a new feed would be published, copy the url and paste it into some translation service but that was not very practicable especially for large websites with lots of news updates.

The Google Reader team implemented Google Translate into Google Reader which is now available for anyone to use. That should get rid of most of the hassle. It’s actually pretty easy and straightforward to use. Lets take the Genbeta feed for instance. Genbeta is a Spanish news site that covers Internet news. They sometimes have great news stories which anyone who does not speak Spanish or a related language does not understand. So it was all about the links and titles that they posted until now.

Now it is possible to select automatic translation of the website’s contents into the user’s language. All that needs to be done for this to happen is to click on the Feed Settings button in the upper right corner of the Google Reader screen and to check the Translate Into My Language entry.

The RSS news feed will be automatically reloaded and translated into the default language of the user if that is possible. Google Translate does not support all language translations which might mean that you could be stuck with translating a feed into English instead of your own language.

I didn’t really think I could be interested in yet another crowd-powered news aggregating website… Mixx, Reddit, Regator, Social Median,  Soshable, Propeller, Sphinn even… whether they’re the next Digg I have no idea… but it sure isn’t worth the time signing up in my opinion.

I was very interested in the announcement yesterday however, that a new service called ‘NewsCred’ was launching with the aim of gathering and aggregating articles based on their credibility over blind crowd popularity.

It’s a fantastic objective, one which anyone who has used Digg over the last few years would probably love to see… it’s all too common where completely bogus stories are Dugg right to the front page (and sometimes consequently removed by the "invisible hand’ of non-existent editors’).

Crowd’s usually vote based on personal preference and opinion as well… a story about Microsoft may be brilliant, well-researched and accurate… but is buried by Apple fans purely because they dislike Microsoft.

W ether or not NewsCred can get around that will be interesting to see, although it isn’t the first to attempt this strategy; NewsTrust has been around for a few years (although I had never heard of it before) and has had slow but steady growth.

The most useful and interesting thing about NewsCred is the analytics option… you can examine the credibility of a publication based on how it fared on NewsCred. Just one indicator sure… but with time it should really be a good measure of the reporting quality of various news sources.

You can also customise the NewsCred front page based on your interests and the publications you prefer. In many ways, even if the credibility factor doesn’t worry you, it’s still a good source of daily news much like Google News.

The only requirement for using Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo account which can be obtained freely if needed. I’m going to walk you through the customization of the Softpedia Windows RSS News Feed which lists freeware, demos, adware, trial and shareware software programs in its feed. Since I’m only interested in the free software I decided to use Yahoo Pipes to filter out all the other items.

You can use the same technique for your favorite website. Say you own a Windows PC and are subscribed to the Lifehacker RSS News Feed. You might want to filter out any item that describes software for an Apple Macintosh computer.

The Yahoo Pipes interface is divided into three panes. The left side contains the different elements that can be dragged and dropped into the main canvas area. You can use them to load RSS News Feeds and filter data among many other things. The last is the debugger which displays the data of the selected element.

We want to fetch an RSS News Feed and drag the Fetch Feed element into the canvas area. This element requires at least one RSS News Feed url so copy and paste on into the box. If you click on that box you will notice that the debugger has loaded the titles of the RSS News Feed at the bottom. You can click on the titles to see variables like descriptions or titles of the items.

You can click on the + icon next to URL to display another form to paste another RSS News Feed URL.

Click on the Operators entry in the left menu and drag the Filter element to the main window. Connect the Fetch Feed and Filter elements by pressing the mouse button over one of the nodes and (while holding the mouse button) moving it to the other node.

The elements are now connected. The process begins by fetching the RSS News Feed, sending it to the filters where they are customized and then to the output which is already available at the end. All that remains to be done is to create the filters.

You can block or permit items that match the filters. To do that you need to find differences or similarities. Softpedia uses classifications in their item titles. To find out about them you can head to the debugger area and click on a RSS News Feed item. You will notice that there is an entry called y:title which contains the title of the news item. You find the classification at the end of each title, for instance freeware, adware or shareware.

I decided to block all unwanted classifications from the news feed by selecting item.y:title > Contains > Classification, for example item.y:title > contains > Shareware. This will block all items with the Shareware classification in the title. I create three additional rules for Trial, Demo and Adware.

It would have been possible to do it the other way round. To allow only RSS News Feeds with titles like freeware or gpl. A click on the Filter element should update the debugger. It should only display freeware and gpl news items. Now connect the Filter element with the Pipe Output element.

The Pipe Output Element should display the same content in the debugger as the Filter element because nothing is changed in between.

A click on Save saves the pipe and enables a Run Pipe option in the header area. A click on that opens the Pipe profile with a preview area and options to use it as an RSS Feed or embed it on websites.

First you have to choose the types of content you want to read about. I was surprised at how well this is structured, although it is a bit slow, perhaps this will change with time. There are a few top level categories like sports, science, financial news, you then choose a second level category, but you can also choose keywords to go with them, further narrowing your news.

So far this can be achieved via RSS if you’re good, although you can’t monitor thousands of feeds really effectively and you won’t get the newspaper feel. DailyMe has the answer for that as well though

You can choose to get your daily digest as a regular email, a PDF attached to an email, your mobile phone, and the best one, you can configure it to print out automatically. Imagine waking at 8:00 to find your daily digest printed and ready for reading beside a nice dose of your favorite cereal.