What is RSS and What Good is It to Me?

A few years back I made a ritual of watching the nightly national news on TV to stay abreast of what was going on in the world.  Somewhere along the way, though, that habit gave way to watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to get my daily dose of political, social, and media satire instead.

I still stay in touch with local and world happenings, but now I do it online, usually in conjunction with my morning coffee.  The technology that is largely responsible for allowing me to swap the evening news for Stewart and Colbert is RSS.



RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.  RSS consists of two parts:

• The RSS feed, which is essentially a web page/address provided by a web site to summarize its articles or posts.  The web site in question could be a news site, a blog, a news aggregator, or a commercial web site (latest bargains, anyone?)
• The RSS reader, which can be locally installed software or an online RSS reader (like Google Reader).

Why would anyone choose to receive their news via RSS rather than more traditional methods (like Peter and Lloyd)?  There are many reasons:

• Saving Time:  Rather than visiting the many web sites from which I garner news, I can scan their topics or headlines within a matter of minutes on one web page.  (I use Google Reader.)
• Choice:  When I watch the news on TV, I can walk away from the TV when an article doesn't interest me, but I can't fast-forward to the article that does interest me.  Have you ever noticed how often a teaser will catch your interest and keep you watching, but, to your dismay, the article in question isn't aired until the very end of the broadcast.  With RSS, you can skip that fluff article and go on to read about weightier matters, or you dive right into the fluff or that bizarre headline which grabs your attention, and ignore the events of the world.
• Customization:  Essentially, any one news service pre-digests (in the synopsis sense, not in the gastronomy sense) the news on your behalf and serves up a selection that it believes to be appropriate for a mass audience.  With RSS, you can still subscribe to that sort of standard, headline news, but you can supplement that with matters of personal interest.  Some argue that this can result in a narrowing of a person's perspective, but I would argue that, more often, it serves to broaden perspective.  Are you interested in the Middle East?  Then how about subscribing to the Middle East RSS feeds from Aljazeera, The Jerusalem Post, and The Manchester Guardian?   Try to get that kind of breadth from a national newscast or a local or national newspaper.  Add to that breadth the ability to dive deep into matters of personal interest; your hobbies, pastimes and avocations; and you begin to gain an appreciation for the power of RSS and the reasons that newspapers (in print) and magazines are suffering these days.
  

Of course, one of the feeds you could add to your RSS reader is this blog.  ;-)

But enough of the sales pitch.  If you are interested in RSS, this young man does a fine job of explaining how to set it up in Google Reader.  If you already have a Gmail account, you can fast-forward through the early part of the tutorial.  You can also watch the tutorial directly in Youtube by clicking here.