News buffs will want to bookmark MediaScrape.com, a Canadian site that aggregates video news reports from a host of international sources.

Feeds from AP, Reuters, BBC News, CBC Television (Canada), ANI (Asian News), and many others are available for viewing. Since MediaScrape is all about news for the visually inclined, there's also a Google map view that geotags videos. Clicking a marker on the map pops up a thumbnail and link to the video.

Video transcripts are also available, a welcome feature for writers needing to reference a report. Registering gives users the ability to customize MediaScrape's feeds to include only their preferred networks, regions, and topics.

One thing I found a bit bothersome was the proliferation of Adsense ads. Video pages display two text blocks, and the video itself gets an ad overlay - you can close it, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.

Still, there's a ton of great news content to view and most of you are probably running Firefox and adblock anyway. If not, sites like this may convince you to install it.

Fav.or.it is a new kind of RSS aggregator, somewhere in between a pre-set collection of feeds like Alltop and a full-on Google Reader-style service. It had been in closed beta, but now's it's opening to everyone. It includes a set of 2000 of the most popular and interesting feeds, and provides recommended stories based on what you're reading, how long you spend on it, and how you rate it. Basically, Fav.or.it tries to pay attention to what you're paying attention to. Also, as we reported earlier, your comments show up in Fav.or.it and on the original story.

It's no reason to abandon Google Reader, but if you're not already reading RSS feeds, this is a good introduction to managing them. With it's Top-Story-focused, categorized startpage, it reminds us more of Google News than Google Reader in some ways. Whether Fav.or.it gets a good user base is going to be depend on how happy people are with its recommendation algorithm. Even if you just think of it as site that exposes newbies to a couple thousand top blogs, it's doing a useful service for the Internet.

If you are looking for news items based on your interests, you might enjoy Tiinker. Tiinker allows you to rate news items from feeds and automatically finds more items based on what you liked and didn't like.

It works like this: as you go through news items and vote on them, Tiinker goes about learning what kind of news you would like more of. Give a post on technology a thumbs up and Tiinker will remember that you have a thing for tech.

At first glance it might look a bit like Digg - but you will quickly realize that it isn't, as the only social aspect to the site is a collection of the most popular posts. The only variable that affects what stories are dished up is what you have given a thumbs up or down to in the past. Also, you are unable to introduce new feeds into the system, and can't get recommendations by cross-referencing what you've liked with users who have had similar tastes.

Nitpicking aside, the idea behind Tiinker is nice. If you like a customized news portal that adapts to your tastes the more you use it, this is it. But, if Tiinker can figure out a way to include some more social features such as ranking RSS feeds by popularity and allowing users to add new feed items, this could grow into something of a personalized meme that tracks the best stories for the things you are interested in. Until then, Tiinker isn't bad as long as you don't mind some of the limitations.

[via Lifehacker]

Looking for a good, free podcast aggregator/player for Windows? For a long time, Juice (formerly known as iPodder) was the reigning champ. But it's kind of a pain in the behind to get Juice working with Vista. So we're always looking for a better solution.

You can use Miro to download audio podcasts as well as video, but that's sort of like using a tank to drive to the supermarket.

Ziepod, on the other hand, is a bit more like a corvette. It's pretty, easy to use, and fast. The built-in podcast directory is also excellent if you're browsing for new podcasts. Notice we said browsing? There's no search button, which is a bit baffling.

Another odd choice is that while you an set Ziepod to automatically delete podcasts that have been sitting on your PC for a certain period of time, there's no way to customize that setting for different feeds. So if you download some podcasts on a weekly basis and others on a daily basis, there doesn't appear to be an easy way to keep the last 2 days worth of one and 3 weeks worth of the other.

That said, Ziepod does a great job of pulling in your podcasts, storing them, letting you listen on your computer or synchronize with an iPod. There's also a commercial version for $20 with a few additional features like download bandwitdh speed control, and a dockable video bar.

[thanks booblik!]

Omnidrive is an online storage service offering 1GB of free space that can be accessed from a Windows app or web interface (Linux and mobile clients are in the works). The system allows users to store photos and files from their desktop similiar to a regular OS, and choose to share their files or keep them private. If you find yourself always transferring files back and forth from device to device or sending a lot of files and photos to people, Omnidrive files can easily be shared and accessed by the individuals you choose. When sharing files with a person, the shared file will instantly be dropped into their Omnidrive account, and a notification email sent to them. Omnidrive also has the ability to publish files to the web with a unique URL that anyone can access. There is also a music player that song files can be played through without downloading them first. The Omnidrive dashboard can be accessed either from a web client in any browser, a Windows client, or Mac client application. Omnidrive is a really simple online storage area. Its clean design makes navigation and working with files easy.

Check out some screenshots of Omnidrive in action after the jump.

Do you like news? Enough to have an online RSS aggregator and reader? With a community based approach to news content delivery? A new service called NEooWS is just that. NEooWS is taking a community approach to news and content delivery by building communities that discuss daily stories, allowing for the ability to provide different unique perspectives. It's a great spot to get the latest news updates for what you're interested in. Through the system you can tag, recommend, and save stories to your account. NEooWS has a nice clean interface, however it still seems a little cluttered when you just want the news. I'm going to try this one out further, but I don't think I will let my precious NewsGator go.

Check out some screenshots of NEooWS in action after the jump...

Anothr is a neat idea, although I'm not sure how useful most people will find it. It's a bot that you add to your Skype contacts and then send the RSS feeds you read. When one of your subscriptions updates, the bot send you a message with the feed content. I've used a number of similar bots over the years with AIM, ICQ, and, way back when, IRC, but this is the first one I've seen for Skype. My gut reaction is that it's because most people don't use Skype as a nerve center the way many of us use IMs of one sort or another, at least not yet. For those of you are ahead of the curve, though, and Skyping your lives, Anothr is worth a look.

[Thanks, Guillermo!]

Earlier today, NewsGator announced a new addition to its suite of RSS aggregator software. NewsGator Go! is designed for portable devices running Windows Mobile. The software features full synchronization with NewsGator Online and all of the NewsGator desktop clients, and caches its data locally so you don't have to be connected to the internet when you browse your feeds. You can also use the "My Clippings" feature to archive content for access - via any NewsGator app, of course - at a later time.

NewsGator Go! costs $29.95 and is available for purchase via the NewsGator web site.

(Thanks, Tom!)

I have tried a ton of Pocket PC RSS readers, and the one that I keep coming back to is called Egress, by Garish Kernels. I don't know, but get the impression that Garish Kernels is a one man show, given the very slow updates to the software, and the somewhat lackluster response times to support requests. I'm also somewhat annoyed that a persistent bug still exists in it (at least when using it on my Dell Axim X50v) where if I leave the program running, it will prevent my Pocket PC from going into sleep mode, and eventually run my battery out.

With all of that negativity, how can I possibly recommend Egress? Simple. It's by far the best thought-out user interface for reading RSS feeds on the go that I've seen so far. It renders quickly and well on both high-resolution and regular-resolution Pocket PCs, which not all Pocket PC RSS readers can claim, and it also caches images contained in posts so that reading offline delivers the same experience as online - very few Pocket PC RSS readers boast this feature. It also contains rudimentary synchronization with both Bloglines and NewsGator, although in practice I've found it not worth the trouble to bother with this feature. Also, there are quite a few display settings under options to allow you to make Egress pleasing to the eye; don't judge it based on this screenshot.

By far the biggest advantage I've found using Egress over other RSS readers is that Egress is optimized to allow you to go from story to story, and feed to feed using only the direction pad. This means you can put the stylus away and read continuously without any tapping. It's truly amazing how almost none of the other RSS readers I've tried have this feature.

NewsGator recently debuted their new Pocket PC reader, called NewsGator Mobile (BETA). Although I had high hopes for a Pocket PC reader that would fully synchronize with an online or desktop RSS experience, I was very disappointed with this release. It renders slowly, looks terrible on a full-VGA Pocket PC, requires screen taps for navigation, and does not cache images. In fact, Egress is the Pocket PC RSS reader that NewsGator should have purchased to build their branded version on. It's a shame that they didn't.

Currently Egress offers a 30 day trial, and a license with lifetime upgrades costs $12.

Say you want to listen to podcasts or watch vodcasts and a) don't have an iPod or similar, b) don't want to (or can't) install a desktop aggregator, and b) can't be troubled to download them by hand. MediaTuner might be what you're looking for. It's a web-based "rich media aggregator/player," which basically means it gives you a web-based interface for listening to and watching podcasts and vodcasts, kind of like a web-based Democracy. MediaTuner also supports regular old news feeds as well as photo feeds.

[Via Emily Chang's eHub]

The folks who make Alertbear describe it as "the free Windows RSS reader that doesn't think you should read feeds like email," and in that aspect I agree completely. Alertbear is a nice little free feed reader for Windows that lives in your system tray and pops up a "stack" of news reminiscent of IM notification boxes when new feed items come in. It has some nice features, like color-coded categories, mousewheel navigation, and feed auto-discovery, but otherwise keeps things simple. Like Lifehacker, I'm not sure how well Alertbear would work for those who track dozens or hundreds of feed, but if there are only a few feeds you're interested in, Alertbear might be up your alley.

Development on the somewhat unpopular Google Reader doesn't seem to go at a furious pace, but every couple months they drop a new feature into it and usually it's at least marginally cool. Yesterday was such an event, and the feature they've added lets you share selected items from the feeds you read with your friends. Now each label in Google Reader has a "make public" option, and when you enable it two links are generated: One that your friends can click on to subscribe to those items in Reader, and one for an Atom feed that they can use in any feed reader. It also works for starred items. You can also do the same for your starred items. On top of that, there's also a new "clip" feature similiar to yesterday's Feedo Style that lets you add a live list of your shared items to any web page by pasting a snippet of code on your site. You can customize the box's title, color scheme (you have eight predefined choices), and number of items shown.

As in everything else, the blogosphere is well ahead of the media-at-large when it comes ot music, so the best way to stay on the cutting edge of music (or at least appear that way) is to watch the music blogs. It turns out they're chock-full of great MP3s, but if you're like me you don't have much time for reading music blogs and downloading song files. Enter the Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator. It watches all of the best music blogs and gives you their MP3s in easy-to-digest formats: Podcast, .m3u playlist, or a pop-up Flash player for listening in your browser. I'm partial to the Flash player because it has links to the original blog posts as well as albums for purchase at Amazon.com. There's also a handy search feature, so the next time a friend tells you, "You've got to check out Avant Garde Dark Cabaret Harmonium Quintet of Love!" there's a good chance you find some of their tracks as well as some informative blog commentary.