Two-Way RSS for Bloggers
If your job--or passion--is to keep up with the news and comment on it, you'll appreciate an application like Userland Software's $40-per-year Radio Userland, which puts a full Weblog system on your desktop. Radio Userland (or Radio) descends from an aggregator that helped launch the RSS format in 1999, but it's much more than a feed reader. Its subscription price covers, among other things, hosting at Weblogs.com. All feed reading and blog editing are done in your browser.
Each element of the interface is a Web page that lets you control Radio through menus, buttons, check boxes, and text-entry fields. The aggregator page stacks the latest feeds in reverse-chronological order, each with a button that enables you to delete the item or post it to your Weblog. Preference pages let you set how often to poll sites and how many items to display on a page. New items on feeds you subscribe to appear chronologically on the same page: You can't reorder the items or sort them according to source.
A subscriptions page shows your feed list; a preinstalled collection includes New York Times and BBC pages and a sampling of blogs. You can subscribe to a blog from another Radio user with a single click, instead of performing the multistep process of copying and pasting into the subscription page required for outside feeds. With RSS 2.0, Radio supports feed attachments. For example, early adopter Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ, has been experimenting with many-megabyte video clips in his RSS feed. Radio sets the clips to download after midnight. [PCWorld]
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