Christian Ross

Forgive my tardiness.

I’ve been promising a short write-up on RSS and its usefulness for a while. I actually did one for another blog about a month ago an instead of re-writing the whole thing I’ll just steal my own content:

The way we read/view/see the Internet is changing. As we move more and more of our information consumption time to the net (news, business, contacts, blogs, videos, music) we can find that we become overwhelmed and tired of chasing it all down.

I alone have accounts for multiple subscription sites including 30 or so blogs I read, digg, lifehacker, muxtape, vimeo, flickr, and the list goes on and on. Information overload to say the least. Please welcome, RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is quickly becoming the way I, many others, and ultimately you should devour the net. It takes the work out of visiting your favorite sites to see their updates. No more do you have to keep a long list of Favorites or Bookmarks just to keep up with your daily content.

Easy to set up, and even easier to use, RSS Readers will go and find the stuff you want on the Internet and bring it to you when it becomes available.

Since I’m lazy and it’s already been done, see for yourself the usefulness of RSS in this 3:44 minute video by CommonCraft called RSS in plain English:

There are some smart people making tools for the web today, those who figured out RSS rank highly in my book. It has changed the way I consume the Internet.

So, how bout some links? How/where can you get started?

Readers:
Google Reader – web-based, free, offline capabilties when paired with Google Gears. This is the one I use with a few tweaks from FireFox, a Lifehacker extension, and some CSS changes. Straight out of the box it works great.

Bloglines – web-based, free

NetVibes – web-based, free

NetNewsWire – software-based, free, offline support, Mac OSX

FeedDemon – software-based, free, offline support, Windows

Sage (Firefox) – browser-based, free

Once you’ve got your Reader of choice set up, start RSS’ing. It’s that easy. Head to your favorite sites, blogs, news/sports pages and look for the little orange (most times) RSS button. Like the one we have in the top-right corner here! In fact, use it! RSS us! We’d love to be your first subscription.

Not every site is RSS’able, but more and more are working to get that way every day.

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below. Welcome to the new web, a one that finds you instead of you having to go find it.

There you have it. I guess in this situation, the ‘us’ is just me. So if you have any questions you’ll have to ask me. Or you can head back to thin air and ask them but odds are I’ll probably be the ‘us’ there too.