This may seem to be old news to some people, but it occurred to me that some of you out there may not really be utilizing one of the most efficient trends in information acquisition since the advent of email – RSS.
If you are one of those folks, you may be asking – “Well, what is RSS anyway and why do I care?”
Universal RSS symbol
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. Many websites produce RSS feeds – basically a simple file (XML) of the website’s content that is pushed out (or “fed” if you will) to the rest of the Internet. This file can be subscribed to by an RSS reader or syndicated on another website.
The beauty of RSS is that you get notified as soon as something is posted.
Google Reader
Checking in is no more difficult than visiting a central location on the web, such as Google Reader, iGoogle, myYahoo (to name but a few), or an application like FeedReader or NewsGator. Keep in mind there are hundreds of different places and tools to set up your virtual news desk, just find one that works best for you.
FeedReader
Subscribing to feeds also greatly reduces the amount of time spent loading new windows or surfing, refreshing, etc. I’ve been very happy to discover new sites and sources of information that I might not have otherwise known about simply by subscribing to content this way. Blogs (like this one) will often point me to a new source of information and I’ll add it to my reader. Since I use Google Reader, I also see recommendations for feeds that I might be interested in on the landing page.
To subscribe to a website’s feed, look for the RSS symbol or a link to RSS. Your browser will ask you how you want to subscribe. Choose the option that works best for you.
On the flipside getting your news from RSS feeds can be a bit overwhleming. Due to the shear volume of information you now have access to, you have to be selective about what you spend your time reading this way. Right now I use both iGoogle and Google Reader. Why both? They both have different strengths and I find that using them both lets me monitor different sites in different ways.
iGoogle lets me add feeds, but displays up to 9 headlines and summaries at a time. I can have different tabs (created by me) for different types of feeds. I use this for monitoring headlines and current events. Google Reader, on the other hand, adds all of the new stories to a feed and I use this to monitor blogs of more specialized information that I am probably going to want to read.
I’ll post again with more tips on using RSS and Google Reader. In the meantime, feel free to post any questions or comments about using RSS.
Need more information? Try this great little video from Common Craft called “RSS in Plain English.”
Here are some other handy resources for learning more about RSS:
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[...] favorite on Facebook, so I checked it out. This clip was done by the same people who made “RSS in Plain English” that I mentioned here a few weeks ago, so I figured it would be informative (and funny). [...]