Since the relatively widespread adoption of RSS feeds provided by websites around the interwebs, I really can’t imagine getting my daily news fix – travel and otherwise – any other way. It’s like having a digital subscription to every website I love all in one, easy to access place.
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That said, a new kind of website has been cropping up over the past year or so that I don’t entirely understand. I’m not sure exactly what you would call these websites. They’re basically just one-page aggregators of dozens of niche RSS feeds.
A good example to help illustrate my point is Alltop.com and its travel niche subdomain: travel.alltop.com, which claims “We’ve got travel covered.” Yes, I suppose they do. A quick glance shows the five latest news stories from scores of online travel news outlets (full disclosure: Vagabondish is among them).
But isn’t this what my RSS reader is for? Feed readers such as Google Reader show all of the latest news stories and/or blog posts that I haven’t read yet and mark them read as I comb through them. It seems that sites such as Alltop.com are a step backward. They may have been a great intermediate step in the days before RSS feeds. But now? What’s the benefit?
What am I missing? Anyone frequently read these types of sites? If so, why?