RSS Awareness Day: May 1
I’d like to know, how many of you have any idea what RSS is? According to statistics from Feedburner, a popular RSS aggregation service, and the Pew Internet Project only 5% of all internet users use RSS. That amounts to about 60 million people. I’d venture to guess that at least 90% or more are what most people would call “geeks.”
Today, May 1, 2008, is RSS Awareness Day. Unofficially, of course, but nevertheless. I personally think that is a really cool idea. Maybe I’m a geek, then?
Most of you are probably wondering, what in the world is RSS? Well, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The idea is, to see if there’s a new post on your favorite blog (hint), you don’t have to go to kevinporter.wordpress.com. All you have to do is find an RSS feed on the site, and everytime there’s something new on the blog or news site, it will come to you, rather than you go to it. You can find a link on all the major news sites for RSS feeds, such as Fox News, CNN, Mahalo, and more. This way, whenever there’s new information on Barack Obama, that new cure for diabetes, or that really cool new iPod, it’ll come directly to what you call your feed reader. Also, if you’re a Firefox user, and if you’re not, shame on you, you can find the RSS feed instintaneously by clicking on an RSS icon in your location bar.
The keywords there was “feed reader.” You can’t have the benefit of this without a feed reader. If you for some odd reason bought Microsoft Office 2007, Outlook has a feed reader built right into it. You can find help on how to use it here. Now for the rest of us who didn’t buy a three hundred dollar piece of software, there is plenty of free software out there. Google Reader, RSSOwl, and FeedReader are some of the most popular. I recommend Google Reader for those who don’t want to install any software, and just want a browser experience, but for those who want a full-fledged desktop application, go ahead and try out RSSOwl.
Generally, if the link doesn’t automatically open your reader, you can just copy and paste the link into your reader. Two clicks is all, and when you’ve set it all up, you’ll be glad you saved so much time, and the experience is often so much better. If I didn’t explain this well enough, which is often the case, you can take a look at the video below.
