Newsmonster

I saw a piece about a new product called Newmonster over on Steven Cohen's LibraryStuff this week (He got it from Catalogblog, which I don't usually follow). It's in beta now, but if they get the bugs worked out I think it will make a really great tool. I've used Newzcrawler (also on Steve Cohen's recommendation), but I think I'd prefer Newsmonster, especially the PDA integration bit.

Newsmonster advertises itself as "the cross-platform weblog manager with a brain." It's a plug-in to Netscape/Mozilla that manages RSS feeds. We didn't really talk about that a couple of weeks ago, but RSS ("rich site summary") allows sites to publish their new content to an aggregator, which you can then get information from. So instead of making the rounds on all the sites you visit every day, you could check what's new in your aggregator. In addition to RSS feeds, Newsmonster can also check non-RSS dynamic sites and extract content.

I couldn't get it to work on my virtual test machine last weekend, but Steve Cohen apparently did. I'll play with it a bit more this weekend to see if I can get it to work. Because it's in beta, I can't guarantee that it won't break your system (that's why I keep a virtual test machine, so I can try new programs out!). Keep reading for a list of features:


  • Offline Browsing. NewsMonster supports fully cached HTML articles for reading while your computer is offline.
  • Any Weblog. NewsMonster supports every major website even if an RSS feed isn't provided.
  • Template Driven. All content generation within NewsMonster is provided via XSLT technology.
  • Mozilla Based. NewsMonster is based on the popular Mozilla and Netscape web browsers. This allows NewsMonster to integrate directly into your web browsing and allows the user to stay in a familiar environment.
  • Standards Compliant. NewsMonster works with all versions of RSS including versions 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0. We also support most RSS 1.0 modules.
  • PDA Enabled. NewsMonster supports running on your PDA (Linux, PalmOS, PocketPC, etc) including the full contents of an article reformatted for display on small devices. Very cool!
  • Rich Images. NewsMonster attempts to use images whenever possible including channel images in the recent article index and favicon images (small 16x16 icons) next to links that support them.
  • Content Extraction. Don't want to bother with images, flash, or bulky and confusing websites? No problem! NewsMonster supports thin content export so you can read an article quickly and move on! This is similar to the content:encoded feature provided by some RSS feeds but NewsMonster supports this for all subscriptions.
  • Rich Metainfo. Metainfo is information about information. NewsMonster supports all RSS metainfo including dublin core, author, title, category, etc.
  • Open Licensing. NewsMonster is available under very open licensing terms similar to many Open Source packages.
  • Fully Cross-Platform. Based on cross-platform and Open Source technologies, NewsMonster is portable to all major Operating Systems including OSX, Windows, Linux, BSD, and Solaris.
  • Weblog Archives. Channel history and archives are available within NewsMonster. This allows the user to go back in time and find an article which is no longer available in the recent version of the site.
  • Semantic Web Enabled. NewsMonster is backed by a Semantic Web enabled RDF database which allows us to preserve the semantic relationship within documents. This allows NewsMonster to act as an agent on your behalf and help you barter goods and services online.

Coming soon:

  • Reputation System. The brains behind NewsMonster are provided by a reputation system with functionality somewhere between Whuffie and Advogato. NewsMonster allows you to rate any article and publish these ratings to enable fellow bloggers to discovery high-quality news. Rate your favorite/least favorite sites and share ratings with the online community - automatically! The reputation system which is waiting to be deployed when more NewsMonster users are online and the reputation system is fully developed.

    Posted by dcplumer at February 25, 2003 05:40 PM
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