Vivek’s Soapbox

I’ve been using BlogBridge for a day and its now my blog reader of choice, for several reasons:

• feed ratings help when you have to quickly scan though a hundred feeds
• the little activity indicators next to each feed are a really good visual indication of which feeds have new stories
• you can sync your feeds up to a server (need to sign up for that) and then sync them across all your clients
• its in cross-platform Java

All the same, there’s still plenty more I want in a newsreader. My number one gripe: newsreaders have to effectively summarise and present information from a large number of feeds. All current newsreaders work on the “feed-browsing” model, where the user clicks on a feed, reads its stories, moves on to a different feed and so on. I want my newsreader to be a statistical clustering engine that automatically learns from my reading habits, and also clusters similar stories from across different feeds into a coherent view. In short, a newsreader has to make it easy for me to keep up with hundreds of feeds without having to scan each one of them.