Acquisition is an interesting word. Often we hear mergers and acquisition. But when one hears the word acquisition it has very different meaning. Merger means the joining of two or more companies while acquisition means the purchase of one company by another.

Nothing negative really. It just implies the direction the two companies are going to take. And
Mobispine, which now has 300,000 plus active mobile users per month, will make use of NewsAlloy to drive momentum to reach its goal of reaching 10 million users.

And they do this by providing improved and easy-to-use service.

Mobispine is available as a free download for Internet-enabled mobile phone.

Other features or services offered by Mobispine include but no limited to the following:

- View Web content

- Save datatime,

- The unique feed search function makes it easy to search the feeds.

Post from: EveryJoe

Mobispine acquires NewsAlloy

This has been one of the most intriguing questions that can be asked when the term quality comes in. And quality at the end of the day is decided not by a software application or even solely by the number of words an article has but by a human. A mortal such as us decide what goes in and out.

And this is reassuring but it does come with caveats or warning. And prime caveats to this is that the person deciding what goes in and out (even initially) is qualified. And if you are familiar with the old print encyclopedias this is the reason why they place the name of the editors and writers inside each volume. To reassure the reader that this is quality work. Or if you are going to buy a book it details the qualification of the author.

With Regator it is glad to know that they have given the identity and qualification of Regator’s Editorial Director – Kimberly Turner.

What are her qualifications?

1. Kimberly Turner has an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of New South Wales.

2. Turner has edited and/or written for a number of Australian magazines, including ADB, Roost, Massive, and Outdoor.

3. Kimberly is at present a senior staff writer for Atlanta magazine .

She seems highly qualified to lead the selection of blogs for Regator.

Dont you wish other aggregators would be as forthright as this?

Post from: EveryJoe

How does Regator do it?

Here is one way of trimming information overload. Use
Filtrbox a business that will filter the river of information for you.

Filtrbox allows the customer to do the following:

1. Add Keyword or Google Alerts to the search. So that you can filter out the noise.

2. Collaborate, share, and give feedback to get the specific results desired.

3. Create custom RSS feeds using contents found

4. Cull feeds that you barely read

How does it work? According to FiltrBox:

Filtrbox is based on intelligent persistent search technology. This means the system searches, and re-searches its sources around the clock looking for new articles that contain the search terms you have entered. What we do once we find a potential new article is the “intelligent” bit.[Source]

Is it worth it?

It might be. However, It is not free. So it might be worthwhile to test it. There is trial version of the service that is worth looking at. Lets try it and see if it is worth the price.

Post from: EveryJoe

Is Filtrbox worth the price?

Netvibes citizens can now do Google Search with the NetVibes Universe. This makes life simpler. And I guess in the growing world of information and information pollution this is a welcome development.

Read the Netvibes post about the integration of search into Netvibes here, Netvibes now fully integrated with Google Search.

It seems that all things lead to a simple and no fuss solutions. This is really making RSS very simple. And its all good.

Post from: EveryJoe

Netvibes now has search … Google search

While a lot of aggregators out there hype their focus on number of feeds from blogs and other websites. Regator seems to have taken a different tack by doing a few things different:

1. Focusing mostly on blogs.
2. Selecting the blogs that will be included in the aggregator
3. Setting-up an easy interface for the punters.

What does this mean respectively? Regaor is -

1. Blog focused ( A plus and a minus)
2. Selecting ( More or less a plus)
3. Easy to use interface (Definetly a plus)

Being blog focused is both a positive and negative feature. One , because for the average blog reader it is blessing – no more information overload. Two, for readers who are looking for more feeds from other sources this might be a tur-off. This does seem unique in a growing world were every type and source of information becomes part of an RSS feed.

And it does position itself as a blog feed reader.

Selection is plus because it assures the readers that what they get are posts from reliable and hopefully credible sources. The success of this depends upon the way the selection is done and more importantly how it, the process of selection, is presented to the punter.

An easy interface is always a plus because it makes Really Simple Syndication simple. Ideally one should start and get reading yout feed faster than saying easy peasy. Lets hope Regator does this.

I have not tested Regator but it does loook promising.

Any of you lucky ones care to comment about Regator?

Check out Regator’s blog here. What would a blog aggregator be without its own blog.

Post from: EveryJoe

Regator Cometh!

RSS Bandit is an desktop based RSS Reader written within the .Net Framework.

What does RSS Bandit do?

- It lets the user view news items in newspaper view

- It synchronizes and updates read/unread status across multiple computers

- It deletes expired items after a certain amount of days

- It can Control how often items are downloaded

- It has support for password protected feeds

- It reduces bandwidth consumption by using HTTP conditional GETs and GZIP encoding

- It has search folders

- It allows viewing and posting of comments in the reader

- It has integrated Web search

- It has tabbed browsing

- It has security settings for disabling unsafe browser features like ActiveX.

Looks impressive for a Desktop RSS Reader. What I liked about it is that one can view and write comments from the reader. The feature that deletes posts after a few days might be a double edge sword that can go eitheir way. One thing seem certain it gives one more control over the the information flow. A pity its only available for Windows.

I love its icon as well.

Post from: EveryJoe

RSS Bandit

1. Pick a style and a name for your display

One can choose from vertical, vertical stacked and horizontal display. The name for the display is up to you: One can name it my other blogs or those that cannot be mentioned but are here. It is for the punter to choose.

2. Type in a feed expression

Feed expressions could be tags, categories or more specific name of your blog. The search will generate or find the RSS feed for that particular expression. And you are good to go … unless you want to be more specific and you can do this by changing the feed expression you place.

3. Generate Code

Satisfied with the content and look of your display. Generate the code and paste it on your website.

You can tweak with the settings for the display. Maybe its the only thing I will say about Dynamic Feed Control is one needs to have the dimensions of the display customizable as well.

Post from: EveryJoe

Show your feeds with Dynamic Feed Control

Consider the following things done or implemented or introduced:

1. A new site interface
2. a breaking news page
3. a Breaking news feed on Twitter
4. a ReadBurner weekly podcast.
5. and support for Netvibes.
6. Widgets

Read the post.

What is interesting is that the competition seems to be heating up with RSSmeme.

And its a good thing because the good features/service comes out faster. As the rivals try to out do or one up the other us consumers will reap the benefits.

Post from: EveryJoe

What is up ReadBurner?

ReadBurner
Plurk

Twitter

Google Reader

Netvibes

Facebook

Techmeme

I highly recommend you read this article. It is a way to enhance your FriendFeed or add more information – ie more information overload>

Post from: EveryJoe

Adding more tabs to FriendFeed

The service is available in Spanish and US English. Its an on-line news aggregator that can be used without registering. But to register with minimum fuss has its benefits:

1. In order to subscribe to a new feed one has to be registered.

2. To mark an entry as a favorite you have to be registered.

3. Manage and modify your feeds and favorite clipped entries on the profile page (You have to be registered to for this as well).

4. And you can arrange the structure of feed collection using an intuitive folder system .

It is not bad and it requires only a minimum amount of information – name, email and password. It allows you to import your opml – Outline Processor MarkUp Language. FeedzZ can receive feeds from support Rss, Atom and RDF formats.

It already comes with a set of feeds pre-selected popular feeds ( ie based on well-known sites). The set is updated on monthly basis. In the near future it seems that the service plans to rank feeds based on a more local ranking system – specifically on the number of suibscribers in FeedzZ. So it depends on the population of FeedzZ.

FeedzZ displays the recent entries, popular entries and as well related information – like other readers interests, related feeds and yu can even follow other members in order to know what feeds yjeu
Whenever you pick a feed you will see the recent entries (you can see the most populars too) and related information as other readers interested in this feed or related feeds based in our readers preferences. You can follow other members to find out their feeds. It even comes with a tag cloud.

The feeds are also categorized according to subjects:

Politics
Science
technology
celebrity
Film
Music
Health
Business
sports

This is an interesting aggregator. And the fact that it comes in Spanish is a plus. It is not fussy and easy to use. And the similarity to netvibes is a good one because. One can view the post spatially – it is nice.

Post from: EveryJoe

FeedzZ it now