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May 26, 2005
RSS Readers
Tech savvy readers and fellow bloggers will find this post to be common knowledge, but for some, you'll find a major moment of "a-HA" ahead.
Blogs are everywhere. There are private blogs like this one, and there are large blogging websites like Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, even Hi5 and Friendster. Blogs are essentially news sources - small bits of new information are released periodically. They come from anyone from idiots to experts.
At some point, people realized that they had many news sources they wanted to monitor, but they had to go all over the web to check them. RSS was invented to solve this problem. RSS is "Really Simple Syndication", and it's a way for your computer to 1. Track what news items or blog posts you've haven't seen yet and 2. "Aggregate" or combine everything new into one simple place.
Why use RSS? If you normally try to keep updated on what is happening on say 10 or 15 different websites, RSS can help. If all these web pages are RSS enabled, then you can put all 15 RSS feeds into your RSS news-reader, and see all the new things going on in one place.
SharpReader - Outlook-ish format and my favorite rss reader
http://www.bloglines.com/ (web based)
Feeds you can aggregate:
- All the blogs you care about. Friends, many politicians, many subject experts for you hobbies (cooking, music, etc), and some university departments keep blogs.
CNN, WSJ, NYT
Wired, Slashdot, CNet, Google Blog, Gizmodo
Deal sites: Bens Bargains, Slickdeals, Woot
When I get a chance to gush about this in person, I urge people to start using RSS/Atom feeds now. It's one of those thing that's likely to be integrated into a major program (Windows, Internet Explorer, Outlook) soon, and although it may seem foreign now, some day the concept of syndicated content feeds will become as common as word processing or web browsing.
Posted by Jeff at May 26, 2005 12:02 PM