The simplicity of RSS

During the last years, RSS feeds have become essential channels of information. Among other, I’ve been using the excellent web application Bloglines daily for several years now to keep track of my favorite news sources out there. My current subscription list includes about 100 feeds that I follow every day, with another 50 that are read occasionally. It is a technology that brings the world closer.

Or so I thought. When I look outside my little bubble I see a technology not only underused, but actually not used at all by the large audience. Today very few people use RSS feeds and aggregators.

Just what are those orange icons anyway? RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a lightweight multipurpose XML-based format for distributing and aggregating web content. In plain English, it is used to grab news from several web sources and present them in a feed reader such as your browser. There has been several different icons on web sites advertising the existence of RSS files, but lately the major companies agreed to use the orange icon.

Using RSS feeds can save a lot of time and provide an instant overview. Instead of browsing to dozens of web sites, all designed differently and taking some time to load, not to mention having annoying ads, I can see all headlines for the site instantly and read more about the ones I find interesting. It also eliminates the pull issue, where you are waiting for a special announcement and don’t enjoy visiting the page every hour.

A side effect of using RSS feeds is that people don’t actually visit the page anymore, thus not seeing the advertisement which provides an income to the blog authors.

An excellent place to start with RSS is using the built-in reader in Firefox. When installing Firefox 1.5, there is a default item “Latest headlines” in the link field where several news feeds are available at your fingertips. Yes, it’s really that easy!

Next step is to find interesting content and add it to your list of subscriptions. Simply navigate to a site that supports RSS and click on the orange symbol in navigation field to add the feed as a “live bookmark”.