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NewsMonster: RSS Aggregator Without A Brain?

Previously I blogged about NewsMonster. With a closer look all is not peaches and cream. NewsMonster is Mozilla based, so it's portable, but reports have it that how it operates is somewhat opaque.

Even worse, NewsMonster has an offline reading component, that crawls and downloads links embedded in RSS. As Mark Pilgrim has discovered, NewsMonster doesn't honor robots.txt. This is simply bad form and brainless.

However, it does bring up interesting questions regarding what a news aggregator is allowed to do. In some sense, what's the difference between NewsMonster and NetNewsWire + Chimera working together? Not much, other than tight integration between the aggregator and Web browser.

More to come...

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