Hot Off Your News Clicking Service

News junkies like me are constantly on the prowl for an electronic Einstein to sniff out the nuggets we crave online, sparing us the daily hassle of clicking to so many Web sites.

I wish I could report I've found my electronic Einstein. As near as I can tell, such a digital prodigy is still just a glimmer in the brains of inventors.

But I have been testing a promising new breed of software that is helping me on the daily news hunt. Called "news readers," these programs fetch headlines and site summaries from hundreds of Web sites I preselect and present all the information in one spot on my computer desktop. They are a more dynamic, powerful version of the digital newspapers that first appeared online in the mid-1990s and eventually took hold at portals, allowing you to create your own personal Web page.

These are more like a souped-up table of contents to all your favorite Web sites, with long lists of headlines that are automatically updated at regular intervals. You scan the headlines and click for more information on those that interest you.

While still young and raw, the technology behind news-reader software represents another way to navigate the Web besides search engines, portals and bookmarks -- the dominant ways we get around today. Most news readers have been created by tiny companies or lone programmers. While some are free, others cost $ 25 to $ 40.

One I've been testing and like is NewzCrawler, which charges $ 25 after a free trial. NewzCrawler strips each Web site to a list of headlines (bye-bye, flashy ads) and displays them in a box at the upper right of a screen resembling Outlook, the e-mail program. Click on any headline and the full story or a summary appears in the panel below.

In a vertical box on the left is a customizable "channel" guide listing all the news sources you've preselected. Your choices include mainstream news outlets like the BBC-TV and Christian Science Monitor along with thousands of niche publications and Web logs written by individuals.

There are dozens of similar products -- FeedReader, Headline Viewer and Radio UserLand are three I tested -- but the thing to understand is they are all made possible by a special data format allowing them to automatically "read" content summaries at participating Web sites. Sites that conform to this standard often display special icons or buttons to let visitors know their content can be scanned by news-readers (also known as news aggregators). The actual technology isn't complicated; it merely involves adding a small file to a Web site summarizing its contents.

You might be wondering, if news-readers are so great, why doesn't Microsoft Corp. or America Online build one directly into its Internet software? The answer involves money. After all, the mission of big portals like AOL, Yahoo and MSN is to aggregate content and charge users -- either through subscriptions or advertising -- for the convenience of getting loads of material in one spot. Portals typically negotiate business relationships with content providers and share revenue.

By contrast, news-readers let you build your own portal for free, without AOL or Yahoo getting in the middle and deciding which Web sources you can view. They let you choose from many more news sources than portals do. Some will also "scrape" content from Web sites that aren't formatted for easy scanning.

It's worth noting, though, that news-reader software was born at Netscape, the company that created the first commercial Web browser and eventually was bought by AOL. In 1999 Netscape programmers wrote the XML code for news-readers (they called it RSS for "rich site summary") as part of a plan to offer users a personalized portal called "My Netscape." Netscape's business plan zigged and zagged, and the company never wound up using the format to create open content channels as originally planned.

But after Netscape publicly released its RSS code, other programmers tweaked it and incorporated it into their own publishing tools. As a result, the format gradually evolved into an open, ad-hoc standard for distributing content online. Any Web site can elect to use it for distribution and any person can choose to receive content through it provided they have the right tools. While most content sent through RSS is free, some premium channels also are popping up.