Chuck just forwarded an email to me, from a colleague of his asking about RSS, readers and justifications. I’ve been an RSS junkie for some time, so I thought I’d take a stab at it.

You can find a full definition of RSS here on Wikipedia, but let me take a stab at a users’ view of it.

RSS

RSS is a method for combining web updates into a single program. As a user, this lets you scan more of the web in less time.

A way to eliminate hitting reload on a site to see if they've updated since were last there.

A concept as hard to explain as a web browser

From another point of view, RSS lets sites tell people easily when content is added or changed. This means that Joe User can add these so-called ‘feeds’ together into a stream of news that they (theoretically) care about.

In practice, it works pretty well. Sites publish RSS (or Atom, see the Wiki article for details) feeds, users use a reader of some sort to view them, and if a story interests you then you can read it.

Sites publish either ‘full-text’ or abbreviated feeds. For example, the New York Times just publishes headlines and a sentence. If you want to read the full article, you have to load the link (which the reader makes simple.) Many blogs publish full-text, where the RSS item has the entire story plus links to pictures. I much prefer full-text feeds; that’s what I have for this blog.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of my preferred newsreader, a Mac-only product called NetNewsWire:

(This is the beta version)

It has various layouts, this is the one I usually use. RSS feeds are grouped into user-defined categories on the left. In this shot you can see some of mine:

You can see I have some feeds (NYT, Washington Post, some others) in ‘News’, a few local ones in ‘San Diego news’, and so forth. The point is, you can group them however makes sense to you and not me. Which I do.

Generally, I sort feeds by how much I read them. News goes at the top, then local stuff that might affect me, then associated high-perceived-value blogs into ‘low update rate’ (named for infrequent blogs) and then topics of interest. Such as watches. (Shameless plug, there).

On the far right, you can see a number of vertically-stacked thumbnails. NetNewsWire has tabs, and this is showing all the links I’ve followed. This is essential in my opinion. When reading an RSS feed, I just hit enter on the one I want to read, and NNW opens them in tabs, in the background, where I can peruse them at leisure. If you have to ‘click, read, hit back’ each time then RSS would be a lot less useful.

Here’s a screenshot of reading Boing Boing, which shows the embedded web browser and full-text feed. Click for full-size:

This shows a lot of the features I like. Note that user-defined groups of news read super easily, where you just hit spacebar to advance screens and skip to next unread news item.

All of this adds up to a system where I can efficiently learn and read far more than I could with my previous system of bookmarks and tab sets. I still have a tab set that I open in the morning, but the news part of that (as opposed to weather and comics) is migrating to RSS very quickly.

I think that’s the part I’d like to emphasize: Not so much the underlying technology, but what it gets you: An easier way to keep up with what interests you.

There’s a couple of follow-up essays I will write if anyone’s interested, on RSS readers, finding feeds, sharing them, web aggregators and such. We’ll see how this one flies.