In early 1992, you could have read the entire World Wide Web in one morning. Today, you can waste the exact same amount of time just disposing of pop-up invitations to punch a monkey.
Even keeping on top of just one major news site can be a challenge. You've got hundreds of sites bookmarked, but which ones have been updated since the last time you visited them? And is the new stuff actually worth your time?
You've no idea until you visit. As a widely tolerated industry pundit, I need to keep up with hundreds of news sites, blogs and message boards, both to maintain my arrogance on some topics and to decrease my dumbth on others.
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Independent, The (London)EbonyDeseret News (Salt...Chicago Sun-Times
Even on a really light day, this can amount to hours of clicking, reading, disappointed sighing, and, ultimately, drinking.
Thank God for RSS. Short for Really Simple Syndication or possibly Rich Site Summary (it was such a good idea that the Internet community couldn't wait to settle on an acronym), it's a standard for summarizing a Web site's contents into a file, to make items of interest easy to find and view.
As a user, you'll never see or access a Web site's RSS file directly.
No, a new button just magically appears in your browser window when you access an RSS-enabled site. In Firefox, it's an orange button in the lower corner. In Safari, it's a blue one in the address bar labeled "RSS."
(Microsoft Internet Explorer? Oh, please. Of course it doesn't support RSS. I mean, come on, you're lucky that it can actually display pictures in color. Microsoft promises to add RSS to Explorer late this year, which gives you four or five more months to realize that you should be switching to Firefox.)
Just click that RSS button, and the browser switches to a much more streamlined view of the page, transforming it from a tangled mess of features, sidebars, ads, and photos to a clean list of titles and article summaries. And if you click another button to subscribe to the site's RSS feed, your browser will automatically check all of your subscribed sites at regular intervals, and highlight the ones that have been updated since your last visit.
Standalone RSS readers really kick the concept up to the next level.
Bradsoft's FeedDemon (www. bradsoft.com; $29.95) and Ranchero Software's NetNews Wire (www.ranchero.com; $24.95) are tops for Windows and MacOS, respectively; each of them make following hundreds of Web sites as simple and fast as checking your e-mail.
The reader checks all of the sites that you've subscribed to, downloads everything you haven't read, and formats it all into one slick, consolidated list of fresh meat. Just as in an e-mail app, clicking on a subject of interest opens the article right in the feed reader whether you're connected to the Internet or not, meaning that you can essentially spend three hours surfing the Web even while you're stuck in an aisle seat of an Airbus.
In the couple of years since I first told you about RSS, a terrific new twist has arrived in the form of Bloglines.com, a Web site that makes the meatiest features of feedreading available to any device with a Web browser.
Bloglines is wonderful. It's one of those fabled Missing Pieces that elevates an already Great concept into the realm of Essential. It's got serious chops merely as a Web-based feedreader. The site is even smart enough to realize that you're in a coffee shop checking your feeds on a PDA, and switches to a streamlined display that's a model of speed and efficiency.
But what makes a free Bloglines account a must-have is its integration with desktop apps. I've got multiple Macs, PCs and Linux boxes at home, and I travel with a PowerBook and a Wi-Fi PDA. With Bloglines acting as the glue, I'm always dealing with one authoritative collection of bookmarks. Never again will I open my notebook and discover that the site I desperately need is only bookmarked back home on the HP, or wade through dozens of stories that I've already read on my desktop Mac.
And honestly, RSS is just getting started. Viewing summaries of Web sites is its most popular and natural benefit, but it's just one articulation of what RSS can be used for.
You've heard of Podcasting -- a mechanism for Internet broadcasters to deliver fresh new audio programs straight to your music library? Guess what: it's got a rich, nougaty center of RSS. And just last week Microsoft announced that RSS will be intimately supported by Longhorn, an upcoming edition of Windows that might actually ship before most of us die.
As a simple idea that nonetheless brings revolutionary power and convenience to ordinary people, Really Rich Simple Site Syndication Services isn't up there with "a system of paper and coin currency of uniform design and standardized value that can be exchanged for goods and services in place of bartering."
But it's bloody close.
Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun- Times.
Author: Andy Ihnatko
Previous article: 02 June 2007
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