I’m a big fan of RSS. There’s no way I could keep up with everything without it. But I’ve found that with the exception of a small handful of my technically-minded colleagues, everybody I know seems to fall into one of these three camps.
- They don’t know what it is, or if they do,
- They don’t know how to make use of it, or
- They don’t understand the point of it.
This article aims to lay out, very simply, what RSS is and why it is useful for the average person, not just for the tech-savvy crowd.
While RSS is not the only technology of its kind, for the sake of simplicity I will use the term “RSS” to refer to any such technology, including its cousins RDF and Atom. This is not to impugn RDF or Atom in any way; it’s just that RSS is the most well-known among them and has come to be used as a generic term for this family of technologies.
The problem
It’s no secret that people today are extremely busy. Let me pose this question to you: how many web sites have you run across in your life that you would like to keep up with, but just don’t have the time to visit regularly? If you can’t think of any, trust me, there are at least a few. Think on it for a while, you’ll see.
After all, how many hours can one devote to just checking in on a site to see what’s new? Let’s say there are 50 web sites that you want to keep an eye on. How much time would you spend every week trying to do that? It’s even a pain with 30 or 20 sites, right? Who has the time to do the legwork?
And some sites are just frustrating. They have content you really want to read, but posts are few and far between. You check every day but usually there’s nothing new. Every fifth day there’s new content, but you’ve wasted 80% of the time you spent checking!
Those of you with slow connections will understand this most clearly. You go to a site, wait patiently to download their logo, navigation button images, and ad banners, only to find out that there’s nothing new to read anyway.
How RSS can help
RSS is all about metadata; that is, data that describes other data. What does that mean?
Let’s say that you want to keep up with posts on a certain site (for example, my site). As discussed above, you would normally have to come by now and again and see what’s new. Even if nothing is new, you have to expend some effort to come to the site, look at what’s here, and make the decision that there isn’t anything new to look at.
Now let’s say that instead of reading my site, you track my RSS feed. You would add my feed to an RSS reader, which would then go out periodically and fetch my RSS feed data. It would compare the contents of the feed to what it had previously seen in my feed, and then tell you what is new (if anything is). Instead of downloading the entire site, the RSS feed is just a set of metadata about the site. It contains a list of the most recent posts, their titles and some sort of summary (though some feeds simply include the entire article in the feed).
Your RSS reader does all the legwork of figuring out what you’ve already seen and thus you are free to ignore all of those items entirely, only concentrating on what you haven’t yet seen. I find that it’s usually the case that I read only a small portion of what is new in any given update; for the sake of argument, let’s say I read about 25% of the new items in an update.
If that doesn’t sound like a huge time saver to you, think about the time it would save if you tracked a large number of sites. My RSS reader is currently configured to track 89 feeds, meaning that to keep up with them daily without RSS, I would have to visit 5 sites every hour that I’m awake. And that’s assuming some sort of system to keep track of which sites you are supposed to be checking! Maybe someone out there has enough spare time to deal with this, but I don’t.
Getting started
The first choice to make is how to read feeds.
If you’re the kind of person who uses multiple computers regularly, or who doesn’t like to bother with installing software, then I suggest trying out Bloglines, a free online service where you can manage and read your feeds with any web browser.
Eric Zorn at The Chicago Tribune has a nice article on how to use Bloglines.
(Bloglines also offers a free clipping service. What is that?)
If you would prefer the more efficient feel of a local program on your computer, there are plenty available. I myself use a program called NetNewsWire, which is a Mac-only program. Apple’s web browser, Safari RSS, also has RSS support built in, but I find it a little inadequate so I don’t use it except to preview a feed before I put it into NetNewsWire.
Windows users will have to find an RSS reader on their own since I don’t really know what’s out there. (Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments below.) The popular Firefox browser has RSS functionality integrated, so you can check that out. It calls them Live Bookmarks.
No matter what your platform, you might find Wikipedia’s List of news aggregators useful in selecting an RSS reader.
Caveat
Just about every blog out there, and a lot of news web sites, are offering RSS feeds. Look for the RSS, Atom, RDF or XML link when you visit them. Some browsers, such as Apple’s Safari RSS and Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, will automatically recognize an embedded RSS feed and offer to show it to you.
But other sites either can’t or won’t offer RSS feeds. Some sites it simply makes no sense for. Others don’t want to make it easy on you because they just want you to go to their site to read their ads.
RSS is very useful technology, but it’s not yet a panacea. I encourage you to keep an eye out for sites that offer RSS and take advantage of it. For the rest of the web, well, you’ll just have to decide which of those other sites are still worth reading.
Feeds to start out with
The links below go directly to RSS feeds and may or may not work in every web browser. If you have Safari RSS or a recent version of Firefox, then they should display correctly. If you get a bunch of garbled garbage that doesn’t make sense to you, just click your back button.
Hot Deals Club (note that this feed illustrates a non-news, non-blog use of RSS)
dooce (PG-13)
imagesafari (my friend Jon’s photoblog)