Friday, January 20, 2006

A Much Better Explanation of RSS, Feeds & Feedreaders

Yesterday, I briefly touched on how using feeds can help you improve your blog-reading experience; I just read a good article in the Christian Science Monitor that put me to shame. It's an overview of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feeds, and it shows what a poor job I did talking about feeds. You should check it out, since it explains RSS much better than I did.

Basically, I left out the part that really makes RSS feedreaders shine -- using a feedreader, you can easily keep on top of anything you're interested in that has a feed. Nowadays, this means more than blog entries and news headlines -- pretty much everything that's published on the Web can (or should) have a feed associated with it.

I'm still doing a bad job of explaining this -- the best way for you to see the benefits of using an RSS feedreader (or aggregator) is to try one for yourself.

The other point that the article makes is that RSS is one of those things where, if we do it right ("we" being everyone in tech), it will pretty much become invisible -- you won't have to know what an RSS feed is, just what it does, and how to get it to show up in a way that's useful to you.

I will be talking more about this in the future, but for now, I'm going to go stand in the corner. Thanks -- Joe

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good article about RSS.
You are doing good with explaining RSS. I've tried for a long time now to explain it to my peers and some get it and some don't. Can't figure that one out. Cuts both ways too. I'm surprised at the people who do get it and then surprised at those who don't get it.

Anonymous said...

The link is no longer working!! ::wipes tear from her eye:::

Anonymous said...

Hi -- I found a direct link to what looks like a permanent version of the article, so we should be good to go. I've updated the link in the entry. Thanks -- Joe