Cool! Chris Sells just announced that SellsBrothers got a grant from Microsoft Research to "implement and study the performance effects of" adding reference counting to Rotor.

Welcome to the club :-)  I'm writing one (here is what I want to do with mine).  Brad mentioned wanting to write one (actually I think he wants to write his own complete Radio replacement).  Joe Gregorio has Aggie. [Justin Rudd's Radio Weblog]

Heheh... hence the name I chose for mine. ;) I know a lot of other people are working on them, so it will be interesting to see what features individual developers come up with. They could be as simple as Radio's is right now or contain go as far as to implement complex data mining routines. Should be fun to see what each person in the community comes up with.

I chatted with Brad about writing a Radio replacement yesterday. We both agreed that the market is ripe for weblog (and all related technology) software innovations. Don't get me wrong, I actually think Radio is pretty damn good. It's easy to take for granted all the different sub-systems that make up the product. Not until I got into prototyping a system like Radio did I fully appreciate all of it's features.

What is a News Aggregator?. A news aggregator is a piece of software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page. [Scripting News]

Unfortunately, you just added one of the worst things about Radio's aggregator into the definition: reverse chronological order. Not only do I find myself stupidly reading from bottom to top (because I want to follow the proper chronological order!), but I also find it impossible to read my older items (beyond what's on one page) until I've read the newer ones, because all you have is "delete" capabilities, no "next/previous page" capabilities. I can't think I'm the only one frustrated by this limitation... an option is a bare minimum requirement here, IMO (but paging is probably close behind). [The .NET Guy]

I agree. I don't think that how the new items are rendered has anything to do with the definition of a news aggregator. I'm toying around with writing my own news aggregator right now, called yaNA (yet another News Aggregator), and some of the features I intend to implement are various methods of filtering (by channel name, title, description, etc.), sorting, and paging.