RSS – Let the WorldWideWeb come to you

I won’t be exaggerating to say that RSS feed is the single most useful tool I’ve found on the internet after emails.

It must have caught your attention before, that little orange square you see on many web pages.  It means that this publish updates frequently and that you can subscribe to follow these updates through automatically generated feed called RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication). You typically find this feature available on blogs and news websites, but there are a host of other stuff you can choose to follow.

we feed icon

Using RSS feeds proves extremely uselful when there are numerous sites that you want to follow and it’s big consumption of time to go to each single site everytime you log onto the net. Instead, this tool aggregates all the new posts generated on all the pages you want to go to in one place.

There is a staggering list of ‘aggregators’ to help you with this. They fall into 3 categories. The most simple is using the web browser to compile all the feeds you want to subscribe to. All the new browsers have the ability to read web feeds (be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.).  There are programs that you install on your desktop to read these feeds, which is almost the same as using your web browser.

The thirds set of aggregators are websites. Personally, I prefer this set because it doesn’t tie you to a certain computer. This means that you can access your list of web feeds from any place that has internet. My favourite is Google Reader (simply because Google has a very attractive package of tools). There, you insert the url of the website you want to follow its updates, and if it has RSS feed feature activiated Google Reader will detect it. You can arrange different feeds under specific folders.

screenshot from my Google Reader

The RSS feed system has enabled me to maximally benefit from the time I spend online. There are various ways to determine how you want to benefit from the tool. Besides following news sites and blogs all in one place, I follow the twitter updates of some of the users. It’s also possible to subscribe to a search term on twitter. For instance, I follow the search term “ylvp” which is programme I attended last year. This way I can follow whatever tweet that has the term.

Some sites publish a huge number of posts everyday(like the Huffington Post), and sometimes not all of the updates are of concern . For instance, I don’t care to follow all the articles from the Independent Newspaper -  I only want to follow the articles written by Robert  Fisk, and it’s possible to do so. Also possible it is to follow a specific blog post for the replies/comments on the page. If you are familiar with the notion of Social Bookmarking, you can find use in following the new bookmarks saved by some users or follow the new bookmarks filed under certain tags.

There are many different ways you can use web feeds, and I’m not sure if the examples I mentioned are useful. However, I’m sure it’s a valuable tool but it’s each one job to determine how to get the benefit.