Despite feeds becoming a regular part of web sites, people continue to struggle with how to use them, and don’t want to have to schlep from site to site to find feeds that might interest them. Enter topic-based readers. With these services, you don’t need to seek out sites that cover the topics of interest to you. Instead, search for those topics and the service delivers what it thinks best fits your needs.

I’ve yet to find two sites offering topic-based aggregation doing things the same way. So your best bet is to try out the different services and see which suits you. The features you will most likely want to look at are topic selection, usability and “scannability.” You’ll discover that some sites are easier to use than others, while some do a better job of selecting and saving topics. The following four sites deliver content by topic to simplify your task of receiving content that interests you (Twine is another topic-specific aggregator that we’ve covered previously.)

ensembli

Your ensembli dashboard is divided into three zones: “Follow,” “Discover” and “Explore.” “Follow” lists the topics you’re following. “Discover” lists the latest articles about specific topics. You can rearrange and delete topics at will. Every headline in the “Discover” zone comes with a summary; email, Twitter and Facebook sharing options; a link to read the full story; the ability to “favorite” the article and the option to delete it. If you’re not looking for anything specific, then you might want to head to the “Explore” area for a list of hot topics and editor’s picks.

The well-organized dashboard makes it easy to navigate and use. The “Discover” section needs more rich content, as the current selections only return okay results, but the service is still new and undergoing improvement.

Evri

Evri, currently in beta, splits its contents into two main sections: one showing your current topic or collections and the other splitting the content into different types such as articles, images, videos, quotes and tweets. However, the service only offers a limited topics. For example, if you want to search for freelance-related topics, instead of retrieving articles about freelancing, Evri delivers content related to companies, brands, people and web sites.

While the service does have some conceptual topics like “small business,” “cash flow” and “email marketing,” its major focus is on people and companies.

The topic page has a cool visual that shows your current topic and its connections to other topics:

This demonstrates the limited topic selection. The “Small Business” map shows connections to companies, countries and products; nothing about finance, management or strategy. Evri is probably best suited to research on companies or individuals, not conceptual topics. It also has a few usability quirks, such as taking too many clicks to get where you want to go.

Guzzle.it

Guzzle.it is similar in approach to popurls. The aggregator posts all your topics and a handful of headlines in columns for easy scanning. Enter the keywords for your topics, and arrange the topics however you like. For trend followers, the service includes popular headlines, as well as the latest images.

The quality and accuracy of available headlines is mixed. Some articles are on target, while others don’t come close. You can’t delete any of the articles to improve your results or view more results — even though some high-quality sites might have more recent articles than those showing in the results. Guzzle.it does a good job with its organization, topics, customization and usability, but could stand improvement on the provided content. For example, the topic “writing” has results including articles on a business reporting financial losses, vintage coats, programming and Canadian town halls.

Lazyfeed

Lazyfeed provides live updates for your selected topics. The topic of “Writing” produces related subtopics of poetry, marketing, copywriting, business, books and so on, in order to narrow the topic’s results — a great feature. After browsing and discovering a topic you like, you can save the topic to receive real-time updates. When a topic receives an update, it moves to the top of your topics list. Getting around the service takes no time with its minimal design and status bar navigation.

You can block a site if you don’t like its content, but you can’t delete articles to move them out of your way. If you find a poor quality site, you can block and report the site.  Lazyfeed doesn’t like more than one word in topic titles, so instead of “social networking,” you’ll need to use “socialnetworking,” for example. Annoying, but it produces good results. You can read most articles of interest right inside Lazyfeed and share them on Twitter, Facebook or by email.

Lazyfeed has an original feature that allows you to “connect to a site.” You can connect to Twitter, Flickr, Delicious and blogs; once connected, results from those sites will start to feature in your feed. The very impressive Twitter results show hashtag topics, along with extra notes.

What content aggregator do you use? What do you like about it?

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BzzScapes is a new venture from marketing company BzzAgent that groups user-submitted content according to brand, so that you can stay up to date on the company or product of your choice via a variety of different types of web sites and media, with each brand having its own BzzScape. Compared to Alltop, there are two main differences. First, anyone can add any content they want (which means it may or may not actually relate to the brand in question), and second, anyone can vote and comment on things added, which should, in theory, mean that the best sources rise to the top organically.
I find it useful because part of my job involves making sure I keep abreast of what’s going on with Apple at all times. Staying current is easy enough, but knowing the slightly more obscure news and whisperings is what gets you ahead in my field, and that’s where BzzScapes steps in. Books, blogs, images, stories, video and more are being added all the time to the Apple BzzScape, which I can navigate either in grid, list or landscape view.

Aside from contributing to BzzScapes for companies that probably don’t really need the press anyway, you can also create your own BzzScape, which is another reason web workers should take note. Creating your own BzzScape for your own personal business or that of a client is another way to monitor and improve your presence online and in social media. Even if at first, you and coworkers are the only ones stocking it with content, the hope is that with time and exposure, others will begin to join in as well, and eventually you’ll have a nice supplement to your existing accounts on Facebook and Twitter with a little more to offer interested visitors.

One caveat before you sign up, should you choose to. The registration process itself is incredibly tedious. That’s because you’re actually registering for BzzAgent, which is a marketing research web site that wants to mine members for customer data in exchange for giveaways and promotions. So they ask a lot of questions. Including, oddly, whether or not I smoked, which appeared on its own page after three pages of other, much more standard questions.

If you can tough out the sign-up process, I think you’ll find that BzzScapes is worth it. It provides an interesting way to find new content that you might otherwise not have come across, and it could potentially become a valuable marketing tool for your own work.  Registration is also free, so it won’t cost you anything to try it out.

What tools do you use for tracking brands online?

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In most cases, social networks were not designed specifically with professional applications in mind. Look at MySpace and Facebook, two of the real heavy hitters. Both essentially began as places for friends and family to connect and share. As if it weren’t hard enough to focus on work, if you’re business uses social media, your work tools are designed to distract.

Enter the aggregator. One-stop shopping for all your social networks, or at least those it supports. The hope is that you can eliminate the dreaded window Cycle.

You know the one; you alt-tab, Exposé or click your way through a number of browser windows/tabs and applications, obsessively checking for updates in each. But do aggregators really save you time and attention? Here’s a look at some services, and my experiences with them.

Power.com

Relative newcomer Power.com is still taking its first baby steps, so it’s hard to say for sure how useful this service could eventually become. At the moment, it only supports four services, though they are some of the major players in social networking. Specifically, you can add your Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace accounts. Not a perfect storm of social media, to be sure, but a nice enough kick-off lineup.

The Power.com start page is well conceived. Your messages (comments, wall posts, actual messages, etc.) are listed in chronological order in one convenient window. This is a nice feature, since even on individual sites, I don’t like having to root through three or four different screens just to find everything specifically directed at me.

Unfortunately, beyond that, I find there’s little benefit to be had from Power.com. Clicking most links opens the network’s own site, with a Power.com wrapper which is more distracting than helpful. And the presence of obtrusive ads throughout only adds to the visual congestion.

EventBox

This little gem comes by way of The Cosmic Machine. It’s a standalone program, and unfortunately it’s only available for Mac as of this writing, with no publicized plans to make a Windows version.

Eventbox supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce (not so important anymore, I guess), Reddit and any RSS feed. It doesn’t provide all of the features and functionality of Facebook, but it does do just enough to satisfy your fleeting moments of curiosity, giving you status and photo updates.

I like this application because it does the work of four I was using previously. It also has the benefit of offering just the basics in a clean interface, so you won’t be tempted to go off on unnecessary tangents. With the upcoming HUD interface, it’ll be even more of a wallflower.

Flock

We’ve mentioned this Mozilla-based browser designed for social networking before. Flock provides unparalleled integration for services like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, flickr, and WordPress. Of the options listed here, this is the only to also support blogging sites, which is a definite plus.

For me, though, Flock offers too much of one and not enough of the other. I find its social networking capabilities too full featured, and liable to distract me from core business activities. Fore web working purposes, I would much rather have the customization options of Firefox add-ons, than the all-encompassing social focus of Flock.

FriendFeed

Now FriendFeed is a tool I can get behind. It’s far more targeted than the other services, in that you define the scope of the information you wish to make available, and information you wish to find. You can use it to make a one stop promotional tool for all or a select portion of your personal and professional endeavors, making it basically a self-updating social media C.V.

On the other side of the coin, you can cut through the static and focus on a single contact, making networking a far more refined affair than digging through your various social networks and trying to assemble the resulting information fragments yourself.

When you get right down to it, social media aggregators should be tools that enable greater control, not distractions that control you. In my opinion, that means being utilitarian in the feature set you offer, and leaving access and update decisions to the user’s discretion.

Do you use social media aggregators in your work? What features would you like to see in future versions/products in this category?

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