If you read most of your daily news via 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 staying on top of things is. If you think 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 stale news by the time you read it
In the US, some magazine publications have drastically reduced copy size, eliminating news sections, simply because their readers know the news before the publication hits 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 at 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’ll see humanity is advancing in so many ways, ways we haven’t even dreamed of, take blogs and the way they’ve evolved, or listening to podcasts, and how fun and informative they’ve 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 a definition, it has many meanings, but it’s just information you get when you subscribe, but what makes RSS unique? And how is it different from Ezines or newsletters sent by email?
Both ezines and newsletters are sent to your email account and to be honest sometimes we tend to ignore them, because they are too long to read, we would waste hours going through loads of information, so we tend to accumulate them 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 out of fashion, nobody does that anymore, or at least they shouldn’t anymore, you see that technology has I’ve come a long way, and now getting informed is easier, and much more fun.
Enter RSS or news feeds, the main difference being the fact that instead of reading the news from your email inbox, or typing a URL and going to a news website, you get the news in your news aggregator. feed capture software, once you subscribe to a 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 everything, time is money, and this is especially true these days.
Suppose you subscribed to a news site, you turn on your aggregator, you will get all the latest unread feeds on that news site, after checking them, the aggregator will remove them and update your feeds with new news.
He wasted no time, and he got what he wanted thanks to XML technology, what can be better than that, well, aggregators come in different types and forms, there are free ones all over the net, and of course there are paid subscriptions , but to round them out, 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, the new Yahoo home page, or even an online aggregator, most of these aggregators are free to sign up for, they work efficient, my personal favorites are Bloglines and Newsgator.
Aggregator Notifiers:
These are simple little pieces of software that you download to your machine, they will notify you with a popup with any news coming to your subscription, you can download them after you join an online aggregator, and they will sync with the aggregator’s server, to check for new feeds.
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 sole job is to capture news for you, there are many of those, but the best would be NetNewsWire for the Mac platform and FeedDemon on Windows, but to use any of these you have to pay for 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 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!