RSS feeds are basically everywhere now, and for a good reason. It can be a really powerful tool for those who want to be savvy on the news, but don’t have much time to browse their thousands of bookmarks.

I’ve met many that have no idea what RSS is, or at least limited understanding of what you can do with it. So to start off with a little background info, Wikipedia has the following to say:

The initials “RSS” are variously used to refer to the following standards: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ’subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

The basic idea is to make a chunk of data (like a blog entry) in a manner that’s really easy for computers to understand and transmit. Think of it as the simplification of (often complex) webpages, to flesh out the content.

With that said; I’ve noticed many subscribers of Think Artificial are using Firefox live bookmarks — which are RSS subscriptions within the browser interface. That’s how I got started, too. But the real power of RSS wasn’t revealed to me until I started using a Feed Reader application.

Here’s a little analogy: Imagine reading and managing your e-mail in a menu that displays contacts and their emails; e.g. John Hilbert (2 new mails). Clicking on the contact displays a list of the most recent emails from the person. Not very intuitive, is it? At least not when you’ve got hundreds of contacts. Kind of like going through the writings of a million monkeys. Well, using a browser for RSS feeds is similar, in my opinion — it works, but is of limited use. Using a Reader application (desktop or an online service, see below) is a much more efficient way to stay savvy and sane at the same time.

When I read news (or blogs, or some other kind of content with a name that ends with an ’s’), I want to organize them by content, and not necessarily by author (there are of course exceptions). At minimum, I want to be able to choose whether I filter news by author or subject. I think I can safely assert that most desktop readers can do this; create a ’smart folder’ which searches all of your feeds looking for a certain keyword, for example (or multiple keywords, posted on a certain date, etc.), and organizes them accordingly. For example, I have a top level folder that searches all of my subcriptions for posts related to related to artificial intelligence. Within this folder, the posts are subcategorized again by other smart folders, such as “blogs”, “news”, “today”, etc. Every time a new story arrives all folders are automatically updated, of course.

If you’re not using a Reader, I really recommend it. My reader (Vienna) has become like a second e-mail app to me: bringing me (almost) instant bulletins of news, blogs and general information tidbits from around the world. On a sidenote, it’s definitely not a perfect way to get or organize news — but those thoughts could fill a whole new post.

Here are a few links to more information, applications and online services for RSS. Hope they bring you joy (joy is a synonym for information, if you ask me)!

Information

::RSS on Wikipedia
::Paul Stamatiou’s How-To (Think this post to the power of 6, with screenshots)

:: NewsIsFree

:: Syndic8

:: BlogLines