Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Monday, September 1, 2003

How To Get Blog/Site Updates And RSS Feeds In Your Email For Free

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BlogStreet - Info Aggregator
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Info Aggregator is a breakthrough service offered by the skilled team of developers at BlogStreet. Info Aggregator allows anyone on any type of computer and with any type of email application to receive selected RSS news feeds coming from favourite webblogs (and also from well behaved and structured standard Web sites.)

In simpler words: with BlogStreet Info Aggregator you can automatically receive any post, new article or review I publish on my site directly in your email. Free. Unbelievable? Read ahead!

As a matter of fact you can receive much more than my new articles and posts. You can receive all post and new articles appearing on as many blogs/sites as you wish to select.

No need for a so-called Newsreader or News aggregator.

You can do all this inside your preferred email application and no matter on which computer platform you like to work. PC? Mac? Linux? Others?
You are all welcome to this party!

This is how Info Aggregator works its magic for you.

After signup inside BlogStreet and Login you will get into a special Info Aggregator page in which you can very easily add URLs of blogs or new sites that you would like to track and receive via email.

Once this is done you simply setup a new account inside your email application following the indications listed on BlogStreet. Once that is done, give and take one hour for their server to digest it and you are set up to receive any new update that pops up on those sites.

Though I have not tested it yet Info Aggregator provides also the ability of posting news articles to your Web site/blog by simply dropping your post on a special folder automatocally created for you inside your email application. While this service may not have yet the ability to select the category in which to post your news item it is indeed right on target as far as providing publishing tools that are in high demand and that are increasingly transparent to the user.

A Quick Tour and simple visual introduction is available once you have registered and logged in.

For the amount of time that it has taken me to set it up and to start making good use of it I would rate this service as excellent.

I have been using NewsGator before, which is a commercial news reader and aggregator which can do also a number of other great things. I would recommend indeed NewsGator to anyone. But NewsGator runs only on Microsoft Outlook for Windows.

Info Aggregator is only one among several smart, useful and effectively designed tools and services made freely available by BlogStreet. If you are a Webmaster, independent publisher or Weblog/Blog author you should consider giving a serious look at this site.

In particular I am very impressed by the amount of quality ideas and services that BlogStreet has recently been able to come up with. True, they have still a long way to go. But if I can judge by the ingeniousness of the services developed so far they look well set for a successfull growth.

Limitations
BlogStreet and Info Aggregator have their shortcomings. Due to the young age of this service (born in March 2003) some of the online documentation leaves something to be desired.

The service has been updated with new features just a week ago and some rough edges are still being ironed out at this time.

Login and authentication procedures are not always straightforward, and the site tends to be overly initimidating for non-technical users, who could benefit the most from these services. A good interface redesign and an effective simplification of the information displayed could improve significantly the service.

Be careful: the news items appear inside a special separate folder in my email application (Outlook 2000) and not inside my traditional email Inbox. Not a problem if you are told beforehand.

Some little bugs, error messages and other unforeseen obstacles in the setup of some of the services make BlogStreet a promising candidate that needs to clean deeply and thoroughly its act before becoming a killer service provider.

Overall my perception is that these guys have been working hard at developing great ideas without worrrying much about the marketing, sales and customer service side of things. Not that they need to go commercial at all costs. But it would certainly help them raise more money if the service could be used in a minute by a top manager of information officer who can't see beyond its Word and Outlook menus.

I have been looking at Blogstreet for some time now, but believe me, to really get the grasp of the great things they have to offer you need to invest some hours of your time. But believe me, is all worth it.

Blogstreet continues to successfully expand an extremely useful array of services that augment the capabilities of any online independent publisher by opening up new opportunities, facilities and ideas not (yet) available elsewhere.

My highest kudos to Blogstreet for the great work done so far while looking forward to greater ease of use, support and stupid-proof documentation.

BlogStreet (http://www.blogstreet.com) and Info Aggregator are two initiatives of Netcore Solutions. The company is based in Mumbai, India and focuses on affordable software solutions. Netcore Solutions is led by Rajesh Jain. Two teams are presently working on both BlogStreet (led by Veer Bothra) and the Info Aggregator (led by Reena Shah).
According to Rajesh Jain "blogs and RSS are something that we have long believed will be a "disruptive innovation" - especially RSS. I see RSS now where HTML was in 1994. Together, they are the building blocks of what we think of as the "Publish-Subscribe Web."

Rajesh has also written on this topic and invites you to read his ideas about it.

In a short note he has sent me today he also writes:

"In keeping with our beliefs about the evolving Web (and our experimental nature), we started BlogStreet in August last year, and launched Info Aggregator a few months earlier.

We have not thought (or worried!) about a business model yet. We want to create valuable contributions in the early days of what we think is something big - this was the belief that led me to create India's largest collections of portals starting in March 1995.

What I can assure is that the basic Info Aggregator service will remain free in the future also.

There is a lot that we have gained in terms of ideas from the web (and the existing collection of free services / newsletters) - you can think of it as our way of giving a little back to the community."

If they had a donation button I would sure show my sign of gratitude for their great work!

.

**************************************
Among the great other services offered by BlogStreet I particularly recommend the Visual Neighborhood and the ability to create a feed of selected sites to publish on your own Web site. fOR THIS PURPOSE BlogStreet has created an area of services called RSS Ecosystem which, if you have some basic familiarity with RSS feeds, is absolutely effective and extremely simple to use.
Here is a sample of the result you can obtain after setting up your RSS Publisher.

Related articles and content:
NewsGod: The Importance Of Being Up-to-Date

 
 
 
Readers' Comments    
2004-06-24 01:53:24

lawrence

Thank you for the resources. Keep up the good work!



2003-10-06 20:04:33

Massimone

Dear Robin,

thanks for this useful post, as usual.

I immediately subscribed to BlogStreet and I liked it because it is quite straightforward.

It's nice to receive new posts in my outlook but I find quite annoying to wait for the IMAP mail account to be scanned and updated.

Compared to my others several POP3 mailbox it takes quite a bit to "send and receive" BlogStreet emails.

One suggestion for you: deselect the "include this account in send and receive" flag in the BlogStreet email account: you will prevent Outlook to access that account each time you click the "send and receive" button.

When you want to read BlogStreet news, just open the "inbox" folder under the BlogStreet folder.

Ciao,
Massimo.



 
posted by Robin Good on Monday, September 1 2003, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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