BlitzMail via RSS

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post.

First, what is an aggregator? An aggregator is a piece of software, often used through a web browser, that checks a bunch of sites for new content, usually every hour. These sites can range from the New York Times to the BBC to more or less any weblog to FARK to this site (a few thousand of the more popular feeds are listed here). For each piece of new content, the aggregator will display a headline, a snippet or summary of the article, and a link to the full article. Radio and Amphetadesk are aggregators for Mac and Windows.

Well, thanks to Dave Marmaros, your BlitzMail inbox can also be one of these news feeds, albeit a private one. And, it’s really easy to set up. First, click this link. After you’ve signed in, just copy the link and paste it into the subscription form of your aggregator (here for Radio or here for Amphetadesk). That’s it.

Now, why would you want to do this? First off, using an aggregator makes a lot of sense if you spend more than 20 minutes online a day; it will save you time, keep you better informed, and point you to a lot of interesting stuff you might not have otherwise found. Second, if you’re using an aggregator anyway, why not throw email in there too? Especially for alums, email through an aggregator means there’s one less thing to check: you can get your email more easily and less intrusively.

Dave’s been really great about putting this together. It’s a neat service and, so far, possibly unique. Maybe if Yahoo Internet Life Magazine hadn’t gone under, Dartmouth would be it’s number one college again.