KEY POINTS:
I've been trying out a new RSS feed aggregator and this one has a distinct difference to my previous favourites - Bloglines and Netvibes.
Feed Journal lets you create your own electronic newspaper populated with all the stories
you want to read.
Here's how it works - you add to Feed Journal all the RSS and Atom feeds you want to receive under headings like Entertainment, Business and Technology.
Each morning, or whenever you like, you click a button marked "generate newspaper" and the RSS feeds are converted into a PDF layout of stories, complete with matching photos.
It looks just like a traditional newspaper layout - minus the adverts. The stories are laid out in columns, photos are formatted nicely, the publication the story has come from has a byline and the masthead tells you the date and what issue you are reading.
Why would you use Feed Journal? Because it is actually much easier to read a newspaper lay-out than clicking through stories in a RSS feed aggregator or surfing to individual websites.
There's another advantage. You can print out a copy of the PDF, which may run to 4 pages or so each morning, and take the pages with you so you can read them off line. It's a neat little service and free to use.
Feed Journal appears to make money by running a similar service for content generators. In stead of having someone in your organisation tasked with putting together a newsletter, you just take RSS feeds from articles or updates on the company network and automatically generate a newsletter from them.
The entry-level version is free, but the ability to have unlimited feeds costs US$19 a month.
A service worth checking out if you still like the formatting of traditional newspapers but want the flexibility of choosing what content goes in that newspaper.
Telescopic insights
Also worth a look is Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope which allows Windows users to look at images taken by the Hubble Telescope and various other satellites and ground-based observatories. A 20 megabyte download is required, but installation was easy.
I've still to get the hang of the user interface but the software looks pretty good - more sophisticated, if not quite as easy to use for the layman, as Google Sky is. Still, there are some great tools now available for computer users interested in getting a more detailed view of the heavens above.
Over and out for Moutter
Simon Moutter's departure from Telecom effectively clears out the last of the old tight-knit management team that existed under former CEO Theresa Gattung. Moutter was one of the biggest earners at Telecom and the most openly disdainful of the regulation the Government was forcing on it - he used to harp on about how regulation hadn't worked in the electricity industry where he had come from.
I expected Moutter to be first out the door when Paul Reynolds arrived, he seemed the least likely to adapt to the new environment. But he held on as colleagues Kevin Kenrick and Marko Bogoievski bailed out.
Maybe he was holding out for a decent opportunity, and that has certainly come in the form of the CEO role at Auckland Airport. The chapter on the Telecom of old is now well and truly finished.