Feed Frenzy

I've been thinking a lot about one of the greatest things to come about since blogs, RSS feeds. Actually RSS feeds (Sometimes called Atom feeds) came out long before blogs did, in 1997. I'm not going to go much into the history, for that you can see the link at my favorite information site Wikipedia.

But I do think still far to few people know about RSS feeds. For instance, I know Rob is going to read this and all of a sudden search the web at sites like Feeds4All for any and every feed he can find. Trust me, he did it with Blogs, these are sure to follow. He's probably doing it even now, without even knowing what they're good for yet!

In case you haven't seen them, there are little orange XML icons all over the Web that look like this . It's kind of like a Where's Waldo of Web sites. If you look really closely you'll see one on the bottom right of my blog. Try it out and click it... I can wait...

Okay, that was certainly fun. All you saw was a bunch of junk. It's actually formatted XML (a programming language for displaying data) which an RSS Feed reader knows how to read and display to you legibly. Lots of sites have their data stored in a database, and use these XML links so that you can view their information when it changes, and without having to use a Web browser.

Here's how I use the Feeds. I have the XML link for someone's blog pasted into my RSS reader. Then every hour it checks the site to see if anything new was posted, downloads the new content, and notifies me that it's there. So I copy Rob's RSS feed link http://daddyroblog.blogs.com/daddyroblog/index.rdf and paste it into my RSS reader. Then within an hour of any time he puts up a new post (about twice a day, it's insane) I get a message. So I don't have to visit his site every day or anything.

Now, for many blogs the blogger needs to enable Atom feeds. For blogger I have a tab where I have to say yes to allowing Atom feeds.

But it's not just for blogs. Check out the Washington Post site, on the bottom of the page is an RSS Feeds link. Adding any feeds from this page will give you updates of new news articles as soon as they are posted to the Web site.

I don't want this to go too much longer. So here are a few links with information on RSS feeds over the Wikipedia info.

• PC Magazine's - RSS News Readers Browser For You
• PC Magazine's - RSS Tools (and using them with Blogs)
  

And some RSS readers. I use intraVnews, since it integrates with outlook and looks like I'm receiving e-mail, but you have to pay, and use Outlook so I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.

• intraVnews
• RssReader - My second favorite, since it's free and easy
• Pluck - Highly rated, integrates with IE and lets you access your feeds over the Web (and free)
• sharpReader - Yet another free reader

Just after I wrote this I recevied an update from Download.com with information about blogging and RSS feeds. This guy is a little hard to understand, but the information is great. Check it out at Power Downloader. I personally think the PowerBlog Personal Client is a great idea, letting you write your blog without having to be online. I'm checking it out now.

Some people have said RSS feeds will be the death of e-mail. While I don't agree with that, most of those newsletters and articles you get e-mailed to you every day can actually be retrieved with RSS. So you have things groups intelligently, instead of just one more thing to file from your Inbox. I love it, now if only I could have less than 20 news feeds at once!

Happy reading!

Peace.

posted by Tom at 12:58 PM