First The Guardian and then the L.A. Times:

“…Guardian has tied up with a till-now stealth company called Consenda, and I met up with the CEO Xavier Ferguson today in NYC. The RSS newsreader (Guardian insists on called RSS as Webfeeds), called Newspoint, is a downloadable app, with a tabbed and clean interface. The newspaper has started offering it as a test download for about 250 users....” [PaidContent.org]

“The LA Times has launched a branded RSS news aggregator in partnership with Consenda. You can find it here, however the service is invitation-only right now. The launch comes on the heels of the Guardian's RSS newsreader, which like the LAT is also called Newspoint.” [Micro Persuasion]

Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for newspapers to start figuring this out. Andy Rhinehart and I have been talking about newspapers and aggregators for three years, and we’re just now seeing some signs of life in this area. What does surprise me is that the Newspoint app is a download, rather than a web-based site.

But of course, the really big RSS news of the day is that Ask Jeeves bought Bloglines. What does this mean for everyone’s favorite, free, web-based aggregator, and more importantly, for its users? Hopefully just some text ads, which were coming anyway, since that’s what I use when I teach RSS at MLS. It will be interesting to see what happens with this during the next few months, but we’re definitely seeing more signs that this will indeed be a big year for RSS. Hopefully, libraries will be part of it.