Saturday 26 May 2007

What are Newsreaders? Bringing the News Directly to You

People need to be in the know. That is why the news was probably
invented. Human being need to be updated of what is happening
around them, at least, or what is going on around the world. It
is remarkable to see how news has developed throughout the
history of human civilization. Back in the ancient times, people
would only hear pages announce the latest goings-on with the
king or the emperor's realm.

In the modern times, the newspaper emerged as a more powerful
and widespread medium for information dissemination. The 20th
century gave way to theinvention of the radio and television as
yet other potent channels for spreading the latest tidbits. The
90s gave way to the boom of the Internet, which is not
continuing to be fastest growing means of getting updated. One
of the offshoots of the wonder that is the Internet are
newsreaders, bring the news directly to people.

What Newsreaders Are

Newsreaders are basically programs that let people gain access
to the world of news. In a way, newsreaders retrieve the news
that people prefer to read so that they would not have to
manually retrieve them from their original sources. There are
two kinds of newsreaders.

During the early times of the internet, which means just a
decade ago, the term newsreader particularly referred to
software that let users read newsgroups and UseNet' which are
somewhat like online bulletins that keep people posted regarding
what is happening with a particular area of interest whether it
is about the wars in the middle east or Madonna's latest album.

Nowadays, the term is also used to refer to news feed readers or
aggregators, which in turn are programs that retrieve particular
content called feeds. With news feed readers, people would just
subscribe to a particular site or a particular section of the
site, and the newsreader would automatically retrieve the
updates.

What is the difference between the two?

The old newsreaders get news from a newsgroup. As said,
newsgroups are like online bulletin boards where people send
messages to be seen publicly. People subscribe to newsgroups to
discuss a particular topic which could be either general
politics, science, music, business, or specific Republicans,
Mariah Carey, or Fortune 500 Companies. With newsgroups, the
members themselves send the news to the server. When they learn
of something new regarding the particular topic of interest,
they can update the newsgroup members by posting a message.

On the other hand, news aggregators collect updates from any web
content, be it a web site, a blog, or a podcast, that publishes
web feeds. Users that like particular web content and would like
to keep track of that content's updates may just subscribe to it
using their newsreader. Whenever something new happens to that
content, the newsreader is automatically updated, letting the
subscriber gain immediate access to the update. The beauty of
news aggregators is that people may subscribe to just a
particular part of the entire web content they like, thus they
may choose to only get updates to that particular portion. This
is like having a particular column delivered to them regularly,
instead of receiving the whole newspaper all the time.

What Makes Newsreaders Great

Newsreaders are great tools for those who want to be in the know
but find it tedious to keep on checking for information.
Newsreaders reduce the need for people to manually go to
separate websites and forums just to see if something new has
happened. This allows people to know about all the things they
are interested in using just one program, making news retrieval
not only convenient, but easy and fast as well.

Where to Find Newsreaders

There are many newsreaders available throughout the Internet. To
know which ones are available to gain access to newsgroups and
Usenet, one may simple visit a website that provides information
about newsreaders, giving recommendations as to which ones are
good for getting updated using newsgroups.

Newsreaders are definitely great tools to keep people in the
know. The convenience and efficiency they provide make it appear
as if news is delivered directly to you.

No comments: