RSS and Atom are friendly names for something called a “web feed” or “syndication feed”. So what’s a feed?
Let’s say we know a person named Debbie. She’s an average-to-heavy internet user. In the course of a day, she visits CNN.com to catch up on general news, checks in on a celebrity gossip site, looks to see if any of her friends have posted new blog entries, catches up with her favorite message board, and repeatedly checks her Twitter page. Not only is that a lot of clicking around, it’s also a bit maddening. Some of her friends update their blogs every day, while others go silent for weeks. The CNN front page is an overwhelming barrage of info, a lot of which doesn’t hold much interest. The gossip site and Twitter update so often that she has to constantly re-visit just to keep up. And while she loves the forum and her friends’ blogs, they don’t update on fixed schedules, so a lot of the time she checks in only to find nothing has changed.
Web feeds and a “feed reader” can solve all those problems for Debbie. (A feed reader is just a web service or installable application that reads web feeds.) Web feeds contain the latest content of a website, stripped of all design fluff and broken into easily digested chunks. The best way to grasp the concept is to try it.
The easiest way to get started is for her to try Google Reader. It’s a free, web-based feed reader that is easy to use, particularly since she already has a Gmail account… the same username/password works for all Google services.
Once she’s logged in, there’s an “Add Subscription” button at the top of the page. Debbie clicks it, and enters cnn.com. POOF! The most recent items from CNN appear in a nice, orderly list within Google Reader. Next, she adds perezhilton.com, and there’s all the latest, snarky celeb junk. She types in the addresses of her friends’ blogs, and they’re stirred into the mix as well.
(She can’t subscribe to Twiiter in Google Reader. I’ll cover that in a sec.)
So now, not only does Debbie have all this info gathered in one place, but it’s constantly updating. Google does the job of checking for new content on her behalf… as soon as a blog entry or news article is posted, she’ll see it. And as a bonus, Google keeps her collection of interests searchable, so when Debbie wants to refer back to a story she’s read, she doesn’t need to try and remember where she read it… a quick search in Google Reader will show it to her.
When she gets a used to the process, Debbie can further refine her reading. She can group feeds into folders based on topic or preference and read them that way, instead of as individual feeds or one big “river of news”. She can subscribe to her contacts’ latest photo uploads on Flickr. She can “star” individual feed items to help her research a topic. There are tons of options and opportunities to either help her consume more info in the same amount of time, or reduce the time she spends getting at the info she really needs.
Now, as for Twitter… the trick is that Twitter feeds are private, requiring a username and password for access. Google Reader does not yet support private feeds. For that, Debbie will need to use a feed reader application that installs to her computer. (For Windows, I recommend Feeddemon. For the Mac, NetNewsWire.) The priciple is the same, the only major difference from something like Google Reader is that the desktop applications only update feeds when the app is running.
With all the stuff that we (and Debbie) have to keep up with on the web, surfing around like its 1999 is for suckers. The only time you should visit a website is to post a comment or make a purchase… reading should be done in a feed reader, where you can quickly and clearly know what you’ve read, what you haven’t, and what’s important enough to consume your precious time.
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