If you read most of your daily news through RSS feed readers or aggregators, skip this article and do something else.
The reason I write about RSS feeds is because of how great I personally think this way of keeping up with everything is. If you think that reading newspapers is the best way to get news, think again, you should keep in mind that newspapers give readers news a day or at best a couple of hours late, for what is outdated news at the moment you read it
In the US, some magazine publications have drastically reduced copy size, eliminating news sections, simply because their readers know about the news before the publication hits the newsstands. Now, most publications provide their own take on those news articles instead of running the headlines, simply because it’s a waste of ink, paper, and time.
I’ve been using feed aggregators for years, and people tend to be surprised to see how up-to-date I am when it comes to the latest news. It would surprise anyone when I start talking about the latest tech news a day or two later. They call me to say, “You’re right, I just read this in the paper.”
You will see that humanity is advancing in many ways, ways that we haven’t even dreamed of, take blogging and the way they have evolved, or listening to podcasts, and how fun and informative they have become. But I’ll cover both in a later article, now let’s focus on RSS.
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndicate, well that’s one definition, it has many meanings, but it’s simply information that comes to you when you subscribe, but what makes RSS unique? And how is it different from Ezines or email newsletters?
Both ezines and newsletters are sent to your email account and to be honest we tend to ignore them sometimes, because they are too long to read, we would waste hours going through heaps of information, so we tend to pile them up in our inbox. inbox until we got tired of the presence of the inbox and decided to read them over the weekend now this is old fashion no one does that anymore or at least shouldn’t anymore you see technology has I’ve come a long way, and now getting information is easier, and much more fun.
Enter RSS or news feeds, the main difference is the fact that instead of reading the news from your email inbox, or typing in a URL and going to a news website, you get the news on your feed aggregator. feed capture software, once you subscribe to a the site will send the latest news to your aggregator software, you can select the duration of the news feed, so you can read a summary of the news, instead of having to read After all, time is money, and this is especially true these days.
Suppose you have subscribed to a news site, you turn on your aggregator, you will get all the latest unread feeds on that news site, after reviewing them, the aggregator will remove them and update your feeds with new news.
He wasted no time, and got what he wanted thanks to XML technology, what can be better than that, well, aggregators come in different types and forms, there are the free ones all over the net and of course there are the paid subscriptions , but to round them up, aggregators are divided into four main types.
Online aggregators:
Thanks to the advancement of what is known as Web 2.0, you get online software like Gmail, Flickr, Digg, Yahoo’s new home page, or even an online aggregator, most of these aggregators are free to subscribe to, they work in a efficient, my personal favorites are Bloglines and Newsgator.
Aggregator Notifiers:
These are simple little softwares that you download to your machine, they will notify you with a popup with any news that comes to your subscription, you can download them after you join an online aggregator and they will sync with the aggregator server, to check for new sources.
In-browser aggregators:
You can find them in free browsers like Apple’s Safari 2.0, which comes with Mac OS X Tiger, you can also find them in Firefox, on all major operating system platforms, and you can also find them in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0 (you can download the IE 7 Beta 3 for now).
Aggregator software:
These are designated programs where their only job is to capture news for you, there are plenty of those but the best would be NetNewsWire for Mac platform and FeedDemon on Windows but to use either of these you have to pay an annual subscription.
What to do next:
Now you need to go to one of the available aggregators and subscribe to one of them, after doing this step you need to choose the news sources you want to subscribe to and choose them, that’s it. Simple, easy and enough.
I recommend that you try a free online subscription to see how useful this technology is before paying an annual subscription and downloading an RSS reader.
Stay informed 24/7 and enjoy!