Recently at a speaking engagement I took part in I was asked by one of the audience members, “How do I find good blogs to follow if I don’t want to worry about an RSS reader?” It was a valid question, as someone like my Mom, who is very careful adopting new technology, may not want to spend the time learning to find and add new feeds to some sort of “RSS Reader” she is already very scared of. I immediately thought of websites like Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop to refer people to when they don’t want to worry about RSS. I was recently introduced to another website along those lines, Regator, which today launched an iPhone app for helping you, your friends, or even my Mom discover new news, no RSS Reader necessary!
The Regator iPhone app is quite simply a categorized index of thousands of human-selected blogs at your fingertips. It starts with a list of the most popular blog posts at a given time, giving you a very useful little slider to filter out blog posts in the popular posts by category, similar to what the Facebook iPhone app uses for filtering friend lists.
Or, you can look at all the newest posts by category. For instance, if I select the technology category filter, the first post that comes up is an article by Ubergizmo about MSI touchscreen netbooks, posted just 1 minute ago. If I select the post, I can read the blog post right there, in the app, without ever having to switch to a browser. I can then opt to share that post via e-mail, Twitter, or Facebook in just a few points of my finger. (just don’t get bit!)
There is a trends feature, similar to Twitter trends, but for the blogs indexed on Regator. The trends at the time of this post were “iPhone”, “App Store”, “iPod Touch”, among others, signaling there must be something going on in Apple news currently. Touching “iPod Touch” reveals multiple articles on rumors of a new iPod Touch coming up on September 9th. I can click through to each of them. The cool thing is I can also filter the trends by category as well, so I can only show Technology trends, for instance.
If I ever just want to browse articles, something my Mom might want to do, there is a directory selection, giving you a filtered directory of all the indexed blogs, by category. I like to flick through, and randomly put my finger down to see what comes up – serves as a fun way to discover new blogs.
Of course, if you don’t care about categorization, and just want to find the news you’re looking for, they provide search throughout the entire iPhone app. Just type in the term you want (I searched for “socialtoo“), and sure enough you get an entire list of blog posts on the topic you just searched for. It’s fast, too!
So, if you get a chance, and have an iPhone, go take a swim with the ‘Gator – Regator that is. It’s a great source of news right in your pocket.
The app is available for free in the iTunes store, or via this link.
