RSS Explained
February 08, 2005
Over the last 12 months, I've become interested in RSS and what it means to me - a typical email user who is increasingly bombarded with annoying email about cialis, viagra, rolex watches, etc.
RSS is pretty much the future of news as we know it. But a lot of the articles are about getting your blog on an RSS feed and come from the perspective of the producer of the content.
Adhering to the Brightspark principle of web writing number 1, "it's all about me the user", I've decided to write today about how you can use RSS as a powerful tool to negotiate your way through the abundance of information that is available.
Before RSS, if I wanted to keep on top of what was going on in the areas that interest me, I had to visit news websites (remember to make it a favourite, then visit my favourites...but then one day, I lost all my favourites...). Or I could click the links in emails that brought me to stories of interest.
Now - using a nifty little tool called Net News Wire - I can keep on top of everything that interests me very easily.
How it works:
I have Net News Wire open along with Mozilla (my preferred internet browser), my email programme, Word, Excel, whatever else.
When I installed it, I took some time to browse through all the different newsfeeds on subject matter that took my fancy. So, for example, I like to cook, so I get to choose from a wide range of cooking sites - they could be recipe sites, or they could be blogs by famous chefs, or even blogs by ordinary folks who live in Singapore, Seattle, or Siberia.
So I have set up Net News Wire to take RSS feeds on a range of items. When I look down at the icon, I can see the number 235. That means that there are 235 new stories waiting to be read by me.
Obviously this can lead to increased stress in the kind of people who haven't yet realised that you don't have to read everything! We are indeed living beyond the Information Age - where the problem is too much information and how to handle it. Net News Wire is a handy way to solve that problem.
So when you look at this blog, you can see a little orange box to the left saying XML. That means - yes please, go ahead and syndicate this site - make the Brightspark blog be one of your news feeds that you choose to take into your nifty newsreader!
Note: that news reader is for mac's. There's also a whole load of ones for PC out there.