If you’re someone who’s interested in some content on a particular site, especially a blog, and you find yourself constantly checking the site to see if any new information has been posted, then you probably would benefit from using an aggregator. Almost every blog engine supports a standard called RSS, which is the de facto aggregation standard. What RSS does is provide a standard format describing recent posts to a site or blog which can be periodically queried by aggregator clients. These clients then provide a simple way for users to see what’s happening on sites of interest to them. When there’s just one site you care about, it’s no big deal to just navigate to it in your browser, but when you’re interested in several or more, the use of an aggregator can make keeping up with things much easier. There are a bunch of aggregators available, as a Google Search will show. A breakdown of some common ones can be found on blogspace.com. Personally, I use Outlook, for which the Newsgator plug-in has been great. Another tool that I’ve heard good things about, but haven’t used, is RSS Bandit.
