1.	Every once in a while a new category of software catches on. It may borrow features from previous categories, but in some way, it represents a new activity with a computer. Often the category existed for a while, even years, before it caught on. That was true of weblogs, and now it's true of another category, news aggregators.
2.	We did our first aggregator in 1999, a centralized application called My.UserLand. It was a contemporary of My.Netscape, which took the same information, in a format called RSS, and displayed it in a series of boxes, one for each source. Our software presented a stream of new items, the newest items at the top of the stream (most visible) and the older items towards the bottom. In Web terminology this form of presentation is called reverse-chronological.
3.	Today, our aggregator is decentralized, it's a key part of our Radio UserLand software. We have competition, our software is not the only desktop news aggregator on the market. There's a lot more to say about the category, but first a definition.