A friend of mine used to read news very frequently. Whenever he gets some time in front of the computer he will visit news sites. I used to make fun of him. Now I am also becoming a news addict. I visit news aggregator sites several times a day. I have subscribed to several RSS feeds at Google Reader.

With multiple RSS feeds there is always the problem of reading duplicates reported in multiple places. A popular story almost always appears in all the aggregators on the top.

I read slashdot regularly. I tried Digg when it started. But then I slowly switched to other sites because many of the top stories did not match my interests.

I also look at RSSmeme and Techmeme now and then. But Hacker News seems to be the one which matches almost 90% of my interests. I tend to open almost all the stories in the front page in different tabs and then spend the next 30 or so minutes reading those stories. Hacker news is getting very popular these days with increasing site traffic. I hope it doesn’t become like Digg with few users taking over what appears on the top stories list. I also check out BlogRunner some times. But recently it does not seem to be updated as much. Read Write Web is good for everything related to web technology.

When Alltop started it was an interesting place to find new sites. But it has lots of drawbacks. It was frustrating, after a while to visit that site regularly. Alltop is a directory. It cannot be visited regularly for reading news. Using it to check the RSS feeds is just annoying. There is way too much repetition on one page. Even if you get rid of many of the feeds they keep filling the categories with new sites. For me 10 top feeds in one category is good enough. More than 50 feeds in one page in one category is too much.

Among the many regular news websites there are very few whose presentation is good. I like New York Times the best. It has easy to read format, great font, good contrast and good sized text with not too annoying ads. Many tech sites have a single narrow column with one or two words per row with annoying flashing ads in between the text. Some good websites are New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Reuters. I also check Google News regularly. While checking Google News if I wanted to read some news article, I pick the above mentioned websites first if the article is available from them.

For India related news, I have subscribed to RSS feed from Rediff. Compared to their website their RSS feed is heaven. There is just the headline and some times two lines about the news. This is good enough for me to keep up to date on what is going on. Most stories are useless and can be quickly skipped based on the headlines. Their website is very cluttered and they also display pop-up ads if you click on the site anywhere. They seem to ignore the traffic through the RSS feeds currently. Before long I think it will be filled with Ads.

The following are the sites I visit regularly.
Hacker News
Read Write Web
Slashdot
RSSMeme
TechMeme
Google News

I have been looking for full Microsoft Exchange support for Android for a while. Right now there is only limited support. There are lots of projects for exchange support. Many of which are still in the works.

There is the open source project K-9 mail hosted at Google code. It currently supports POP, IMAP and self signed certificates. This does not support third party certificates yet.

There is Aadvark labs which is in limited beta currently. I have signed up for the beta release and they are yet to invite me. Next set of invites are supposed to go on January 19th.

There is an application called ContactsSync for syncing contacts from your exchange to the phone. I could not find it in Android market by searching for contact. But when I searched for exchange it showed up. I did not try this one since I need the full email and calendar support and not just the contacts.

Also I found another application called TouchDown which claims full Exchange support. I tried TouchDown. But it does not seem to work when you need to be within a corporate network to have outlook web access. The free edition of TouchDown enables you to sync and read one day’s email and Calendar and all the Contacts. The full version costs $29.99.

There is also CompanionLink which works on a PC and syncs outlook and Gmail. This costs $29.95. But I do not want to send my corporate mail to Gmail.

Moonrug software also has support for Exchange. I have not tried it. I think it uses outlook web access and is possibly similar to TouchDown. This is available for free until March 1, 2009.

There is also no WiFi support with security certificates in Android. If this is supported, it would enable some to connect to their network and then check e-mail through an internal website at least when they are near their corporate wifi network.