Tim Lott of the Austin American-Statesman let me know that his company has just launched its own branded feed reader:
My Statesman. This service is powered by
Pluck, the company which created a popular plugin-style feed reader for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
I think this sort of branded service is a great idea, although I'd be curious to know how well the Statesman fares with helping its audience grasp how to use feeds effectively. In my experience, feeds are not an intuitive concept for people who are accustomed to reading print newspapers and ordinary Web sites. That's why I wrote my 2003 tutorial, "What are Feeds and Why Should You Care?"
Pluck has been a busy, busy company. When I visited their site recently, I noticed they offer an intriguing suite of social-media tools called SiteLife. The Statesman's new feed reader leverages one tool in this suite, MyNews Portal -- and their blogs rely on Pluck's SiteLife Blogs tool.
I can't offer an opinion on the quality of Pluck's SiteLife tools or services, since I haven't used them. However, I do think this sort of brandable suite of community-and user-focused tools is an excellent idea that meets a pressing current need in the news industry.
I'm personally far less optimistic about Pluck's BlogBurst service, which aims to syndicate selected bloggers to mainstream news organizations. Seems to me that news organizations have been hiring writers for years -- who needs a middleman there? I could be proven wrong on that, of course -- but we'll see.
