RSS

January 25th, 2009

The times have changed. The information is everywhere. The only way to survive is to ignore it. But then, how will you find out about the news, the hot gossip or gadgets? The answer is RSS. It stands for Really Simple Syndication – a standard, that enables you to follow the news from several sources in real time without even visiting their sites. You subscribe to updates, the way you subscribed for your paper in the past. The thing you have to look for – the ‘RSS’ abbreviation and the orange RSS icon.

RSS Icon

There are several ways to access news via RSS. One is to read an aggregator website, into which somebody has pre-selected sources based on a common criteria – all technology news or all blogs from a certain country. The other is to select the sources yourself and display the new items in some sort of an application – either web-based or a program, installed locally on your computer. Most common web-based applications include Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, Technorati and My Yahoo! to name just a few. The local application approach relies on an installed program, most commonly the very browser you are reading this site with – Mozilla Firefox‘s Live Bookmarks or Internet Explorer’s Feeds, a mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mac OS X Mail) or a standalone RSS-reader.

After having tried a lot of different approaches and solutions, my personal favorite is now the Thunderbird application. And you can start by subscribing to the Digital Day’s RSS Feed.