Nigeria Content Online

In today’s world
news moves faster than it ever has at any point in history, and the
demand for 24 hour news has fuelled a lot of competition between
traditional journalists and bloggers who generally take sides in a
story. The question is how can people keep up in this ‘world gone mad’?

A news aggregator
is a programme that takes a list of websites that you want to monitor,
and collects news from them on your behalf, constantly alerting you
when something new happens. Aggregators do this by subscribing to RSS
feeds. RSS (meaning Really Simple Syndication), is an XML based feed
language.

There are many RSS
programmes out in the wild, but my personal favourite is the Firefox
extension, Newsfox. If you are a KDE 4.x user, there is a programme
that I’m currently playing with called RSSNow, a nice little plasmoid
that displays your feeds in a ticker format scrolling across your
desktop. Pretty cool.

However, the RSS
programme we are interested in today is called Miro. Miro is an open
source Internet television programme that can deliver HD video and
audio. Its killer feature is that as an aggregator, it can keep track
of the latest episodes of your favourite TV programmes and work as a
digital video recorder. It can download that recent episode of Tinsel
if it is available online. This means that you can watch your programme
later on, if as is the case with most Internet connections around these
parts your live stream keeps lagging or breaking up.

The default setting
is to save the videos for up to six days, but you have the option of
saving permanently. Miro can also play videos in full-screen so that
boys can gather around to watch Stoke beat Manchester United. It also
has a built-in TV guide and a community (open source is heavy on
communities) rating system.

Positive attributes

Asides its RSS
programme, Miro incorporates a bit-torrent client, and depending on
your platform, a media player (Xine for Linux, VLC for Windows or
QuickTime for Mac). Another nice attribute of Miro is that it supports
the most popular video formats in use. This means that it can also
function as a great video/audio player when you are offline, no need to
start exploring the backwaters of the Internet for the right codecs to
play that matroska file. As a bonus, Participatory Culture Foundation,
the makers of Miro also offer another free programme, Miro Video
Converter. No prizes for guessing what that one does…

So why not fire up that browser and give it a try?