OK, so over the last week I have been asked to use Rojo and Google News to see benefits (if any) and just generally compare how I got on with them both.
Rojo... well initially I made a big error by ticking the boxes for feeds that I'd be interested in, giving me something in the region of 100,000+ posts/news stories to read... I've only got a week and it updates as well! So I had to go through all the feeds I had subscribed to and narrow it down which took AGES. It now has just 5 categories, yet still about 15,000 to read. In hindsight (what a wonderful thing) I would ave skipped the automatic feeds that Rojo chooses and selected them individually, but this may also have been time-consuming... On the time front Rojo doesn't score too highly.
As far as the feeds shown are concerned it was OK, they are displayed most recent first so if you use the site regularly you'll catch the latest ones. There is also an option to display by 'relevance'... huh? Relevant to what? How would it know what I think is relevant?
When all is said and done, I did find some more blogs about my interests and so in tat way it was a useful tool.
One more thing which I haven't found so I'm assuming it's not a feature - it would be nice if there were links to the respective sites where the feeds have come from... Not that hard
Next up is Google News..
I must say out of the two I probably used Rojo more this week, although Google did start to become more useful as i went on. Basically, I customized my Google Page and cut out all the irrelevant stuff (like most US news..) So my top 4 links to news were: Sport(UK), Men's Style (I'll come back to this), World News, and UK News. This helped to just check things that I wanted to find out about and I'm not quite sure how the top results were calculated but it seems to be a 'most popular' sort of thing - possibly a problem if I need the most up-to-date news.
OK, now back to the men's style part, there is the option to add a custom news section, and I went for men's style. This ended up being pretty much a Google search and there really wasn't much about style, apparently I want to find out about basketball...
All-in-all, this was helpful for finding out news, but not so much for interests.
So there we have it, my experiences with Rojo and Google.
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Good post - you've covered the problems and (possible) benefits of Rojo/Google News pretty well. I think that feeds/aggregators are mainly useful if you're a news junkie and require the latest news across a wide range of fields or if you want to focus in on a much tighter area of news than the big news sites/newspapers would cover...
But as you point out, even then you need to refine your search terms quite carefully... did you carry on using either service?
Jim
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