First e-mail, then the web, now… RSS! - Why People Should Care
Over the last couple of years a quiet revolution has been taking place on the internet that is only just now entering popular consciousness and that revolution goes by the acronym of RSS. Although there are several theories about what the acronym stands for my favorite is Really Simple Syndication. In order to understand why RSS is important you have to go back a bit.
In the late 80’s when I first encountered the internet I was at university in Sydney. At that time the computer science department had an aging VAX system for undergraduates with green screen terminals for us to do our programming assignments. That system was my first introduction to one of the three key internet technologies I’m going to cover in this post e-mail. The terminals were located in the basement of the Basser building and it wasn’t uncommon for my classmates and I when passing the Basser building on the way to somewhere else to “just pop in and check our e-mail”, often to the bemusement of other friends who were doing other courses. Back then we were the vanguard who had caught the e-mail bug and, although we could only e-mail other students, had become addicted to this form of communication.
The second major turning point in my internet lifetime was the first time I saw the World Wide Web (before it became just “The Web”). My colleague Dan Baldry called a few of us over to the comms room in the IBM building in Darling Park where he had his Thinkpad hooked in to the fax line with his modem and showed us IBM Web Explorer running on OS/2 hooked in to the World Wide Web. I remember being totally blown away by this and quickly installing this on my own machine so I could do it too. For me the web revolution had begun. Back then, like before with e-mail, there were only a few of us who had caught the bug, a few who rapidly grew into many more.
E-mail and the Web are two ways of communicating online that are fundamentally different. With e-mail you have someone else deciding what you will find interesting. Sometimes that is welcome like when you get e-mail from your family and friends. Sometimes this isn’t welcome like when you get spam. In either case information from multiple sources is delivered to you in an easy to use interface, your e-mail program, where you can manage and deal with it either manually or automatically using filtering rules and the like. With the web you decide what is interesting to you by visiting the websites that you are interested in. The problem with the web is that for every different source of information you are interested in you have to expend time and attention to go to the web site. If you find new information this is well and good but often, you find that nothing has changed and you have wasted the effort you expended. Also the effort you expend means that keeping track of a large number of sites is difficult in today’s time poor society due to the time it takes you.
What if you could have a single interface where all of the updates to all of the websites that you decide you want to see could be delivered to you in one simple to use and manage interface like your e-mail client? That is what RSS is! RSS requires you to get a piece of software, like your e-mail client or your web browser, called an RSS reader or RSS aggregator. Similar to e-mail you can either use a web based reader like Bloglines or News Gator or download a piece of software like Omea Reader. There are even browsers like Firefox or e-mail clients like the new version of Yahoo Mail that include RSS readers alongside their other functionality. The way a reader or aggregator works is like this: Web sites that support RSS publish a special web page on their site that is designed to be read by an RSS aggregator and not by a web browser. Every time they update their site they update this special page (there is software that helps them do this) which has a copy (or a summary for some sites) of the information that has been placed on the site formatted so that an RSS aggregator (not a web browser) can read it. What you do is go to your RSS reader and enter the URL of this special web page which is called a “feed”. Your reader will then go and check the page for you on a regular basis and, if the information has changed since the last time it checked, give you a list of the new items. You can then either read the item right there in your reader or go to the website itself for further information.
How do you find feeds to add to your reader? Well most sites (including this one) will advertise feeds by including a special orange icon like the ones you can see over there on the right. Alternatively they might include a little orange rectangle with the letters XML in white over it. If you click on the icon your browser will go to the special page and you can then go to the address bar, copy the URL, and paste it into your RSS reader. Once you know about the icons you will begin seeing them everywhere you go.
RSS is just starting to emerge from the preserve of the few early adopters into wider adoption by the masses so now is a good time to get on board. Go on, it really is a very useful tool.
