Technically Speaking

In todays fastmoving, over busy society many people do not want to take the time to read the news. Sure it is available in many formats from print to television to radio to the newest of the available choices, the Internet.

Many sites have sprung up to provide news, Fox News, CNN, and the other major and even local news companies. Portal sites like Yahoo, MSN, and Google have also come up with ways to bring you as much news as you might need everyday. This technology is great, I for one would rather read the relevant news on the Internet than sit in front of the television or pay to get the newspaper every morning.

What if there were a way to bring all of the news from the websites you visit everyday into one place where you could read them all at once? How easy would that make things?

The way this is done is through a web protocol called RSS or Really Simple Syndication. When content to be syndicated is produced, an rss file or feed is produced. This feed is kept in a file separate from the original URL. This file uses a formatting language to organize information into titles and brief descriptions. Similar to what you might see on a news site. The Internet users who wish to read this content then subscribe to the contents feed.

When you subscribe to a feed, your web portal or desktop reader will check in with the feed at specified intervals for new content, when the feed is updated… presto, you have new things to read. No surfing, searching, or extended browsing required.

Sites such as the one you are reading now, known as webblogs, can also publish RSS feeds. The software used to create the content for the webpage also creates its RSS feed. You can subscribe to the feed for this site and other weblogs just like other news sites.

Sites are denoted as having a feed have a link to that feed, usually displayed by an orange RSS icon like this .

A feeds file contains a snippet of information about the article, or can contain the entire item depending on the publisher. The content is formatted in a human readable and very loose way, keep in mind when you look at the actual feed file in your browser you will probably send email telling me that it isnt very readable. So we will spare the boring technical graphic (for now).

When feeds are pulled in by Yahoo’s News reader (available through my.yahoo.com with a free account) they are displayed as shown below:

There is a company out on the Internet that gets RSS and aggregation, aggregation is the buzzword used by many to describe the process of pulling in content from various sources. The company is called NewsGator. They have an online reader, much like the yahoo reader, but focused on RSS and in my opinion easier to use. That reader is shown below:

And for those of you who like an application outside your browser to investigate this technology, Newsgator produces a few desktop applications for reading the news. There is Feed Demon for Windows and Net News Wire for the Macintosh. These applications have free trial periods of 30 days and a cost of $29.95 following the trial period (clicking on the name of the app above will download the trial to your PC). They also have tutorials that go past the scope of this article.

A Feed Demon screenshot is shown below:

Now that I have opened up the idea of RSS and News readers I hope you will look at this new technology. When you first begin playing with the applications or protocols there may be some questions as to where to find feeds… in truth, google, yahoo, and other searches would provide many results however there are a few search engines just for this type of thing. One of these is www.icerocket.com. You can search the web, blogs, myspace.com and other things.

Note: Feed Demon and the NewsGator online reader will let you search for feeds on a specific topic if you do not know the address of the feed.

So we have looked at what RSS is and a little about how it works, but what can it do for you?