Aggregators

Aggregators are computer software or websites that can bring together information from multiple online sources. For example a news aggregator will collate information from other news sources or a review aggregator will collate reviews of films or products.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication is a web feed that allow users and apps to access updates to websites in a computer readable format.
Whenever you see the icon above this means that you can subscribe to news feeds from this particular website or blog. You can read these feeds using an RSS Reader, examples of which I’ve given below. The reader will aggregate all of the feeds you subscibe to and present them as headlines and an into to the new information. The advantage of this is that you don’t need to keep checking for updates, the reader will collate them for you and you can then read them at a time convenient to you. Common Craft have created a RSS in Plain English video that helps to explain this further.

Sadly Google Reader a very popular tool was disbanded in 2013. Below are some alternatives.

News Aggregators

Feedly compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customise and share with others.

Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation tool. It aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to “flip” through the articles, images and videos being shared.

Dashboards

iGoogle was one of my favourites, but is yet another Google product that has been taken off the shelf. You could view a variety of different tools all on page selected by you. This might include Google Reader (also now gone), the news headlines from the BBC or newspapers of your choice, a calendar, clock(s) GMT and international time zones, currency converter, dictionary and much more.