LibraryTechtonics

Time for a very public apology.

NewsGator *Online* is free. Not, as I had previously stated, the fabulously cool NewsGator Outlook program, which, in my opinion, is well worth the $29.00. Thank you very much to John Carmichael, Director of Business Development over at NewsGator, for the very professional and kind correction to my mistake.

NewsGator now has a nice, scalable model for meeting various needs of both personal *and* business news feed readers. There’s the NewsGator Online service, which gives you the basic online news aggregator for free. Then there are the NewsGator Online Premium Services, which offers personal and business packages of their premium offerings including content specifically for NewsGator users, mobile feeds, smart feeds based on keywords, and even the crazy Media Center Edition, which allows you to view your feeds on your TV with the help of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004. Imagine using your TV remote to browes and read text, audio, and video feeds. Crazy. Add to that the NewsGator Outlook product, and the ability to sync between the Outlook and Online products, and it’s a very nifty software solution.

So yes, I apologize for the information gaffe. I could use the John Stewart/Martin Lawrence defense and say, “Let’s face it, I was dehydrated,” but this was totally my bad.

Thanks to a post on the Library Grrrls livejournal community, I found out that the Future Librarian Dot Com site was looking for contributing members. I sent in an application, and got approved, so I’ll be writing articles for and responding to bulletin board posts from newbie librarians, recent grads, grad students, and those contemplating grad school. If you fit into any of these categories, or an experience librarian wanting to know what’s going on with the NextGen librarians, stop by the site.

Cool.

At a recent interview presentation, I talked about different types of aggregators, and I mentioned NewsGator as having a niche market in being able to integrate news feeds into that ever-present office planning tool, Outlook (which I also happen to use at home).

Niftiness has been achieved now that NewsGator is *free*. Thanx so much to Tara Calishain over at ResearchBuzz for spreading the good word. I use Outlook at home with an older version of the PlanPlus integration software from FranklinCovey, because I’m somewhat of a planning freak (but hey, planning leaves you flexible to change, so it’s all good), so I’m not sure that I’d be able to add another plug-in style module to my installation here at home. However, many of the positions I’ve interviewed for thus far have mentioned the use of Outlook on their library employee computers, so being able to plug your news aggregation into your everyday planning and administration would be super keen and seemless, like reading news groups in Outlook Express.

30 years and still going strong.

All done. The New Entry interface has some neat new toys, like buttons for the bold/italics/underline trio, as well as creating a link, an email link, blockquote (yay!), and uploading a file.

The Categories interface looks different, and I think that subcategories are built into this release. There is also the ability to have category pages and other pages like it generated on the fly with PHP, instead of having to rebuild them all the time. Interesting stuff, I’ll play with it later.

Overall, the admin interface is a smidge sleeker-looking, and I could be imagining this, but I think it runs a smidge faster.