Skip to main content

The Problem with Newsreaders

Don't get me wrong, I am one of the innumerable converts who have taken to reading news and blogs via newsreaders instead of jumping from URL to URL. Navigation is uniform across all site-feeds and the convenience is too much to be ignored.

But after using some of the best newsreaders (both desktop and web-based), I've come to realize there's at least one critical flaw that's innate to all of them: the lack of hierarchy in news presentation. All news items get the same amount of coverage irrespective of how vital or trivial the issue might be. So India launching a foreign satellite for the first time is only as important as an unknown girl eloping with an equally unknown boy when viewed through a newsreader!

The other flaw, those less critical, is the problem of redundancy. When you read news from multiple sources, you often come across the same issue being covered by more than one. Although the same problem persists if you prefer URL-hopping, a better alternative is to stick to one site that covers it all. And if you indeed rely on a particular site for most of your news cravings, a newsreader would make little sense except for subscribing to the lesser or more specialized sites and blogs.

Here's my pattern. I rely heavily on Yahoo! News (the most trafficked news site on the Net). The labor pains are too much for me to individually visit the other news sites (mostly science, technology and editorial) and blogs. So I read them through Google Reader or My Yahoo. These two readers have vastly different approaches to newsreading and I guess the perfect reader would have to a hybrid of the two, disparate though their approaches may seem!

Comments

saurabh said…
another issue that i have faced with installed ones are that even though they are continuously running in your system tray, it sometimes takes them hours to show new feed after it has been published on the website.
i even tried tweaking them to get refreshed every 5 mins but the story continued.
Deepanjan said…
That's very odd. I've not faced this issue with desktop newsreaders. Anyway, I feel web-based ones are better. Google Reader is a killer.
Sebastian said…
gosh 900 a year for yahoo premium
Would it not have been better if you got a deepanjannag.com for probably half the price and hooked it up with

http://www.google.com/a/org/
Deepanjan said…
I'm not too sure. Anyway, Rs.75 per month for Yahoo! Mail Premium doesn't look too expensive.
Yahoo! Go on my mobile would make the whole experience very symbiotic. But I guess Yahoo! Go Gamma is too heavy for my 6681 to handle. That's strange because the 6681 was one of the very few handsets to be supported by Go.
Sebastian said…
try m.flickr.com from ur mobile

Popular posts from this blog

This is what Bertrand Russell said about religion...

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. ... A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

The year that was

I'm wearing a rather striking shirt, one that makes me feel like a clown fooling around in a graveyard. Roving eyes latch on to me and make me too conscious of myself. Checkered in red, grey, black and maroon, I've excused myself into donning it and looking silly for two reasons. It's Friday and…more importantly, the last working day of the year. Tailored half-a-year back, I never had the courage to wear it, not until today. It's that time of the year when it's time to reflect on the events that transpired. Last year ended on the worst possible note. Dad had expired and I was numb with shock. The repercussions rippled halfway thought this year. Things were so abysmal initially that I had lost the will to live. Acrid in everything I did, I was immensely angered by time phlegmatically flowing through its cadence. It was as if Dad meant nothing to anybody. What right did people have to live the way they always had when Dad was no more? Why was much of the world still