Fnord.

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:

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under News, Reviews and recommendations, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.