Many of us scan the Internet daily for business or pleasure. I sometimes read up to a dozen technology sites in course of the day to keep up on the latest products and to gather ideas for this column.
The conventional way to do this is open one window at a time, which makes for a jumble of icons that pile up on the task bar at the bottom of your screen. Another way to approach this is to use a tabbed browser feature that Firefox (which I mentioned in a previous column) or Apple's Safari browser employs. This allows you to open a bunch of windows (all marked by tabs) simultaneously. However, this technique has limitations. If you open a lot of Web pages at once, the tabs become really tiny and it's difficult to make out what the Web is or they simply are hard to see.
Fortunately there's a solution for hard core Web surfers at hand in a new technology called RSS, aka Really Simple Syndication. It's essentially a software program that anyone can download for free and install to make Web sites easier to scan. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) provides a simple way to monitor fresh content.
RSS feeds highlight new Web material so you don't have to constantly check a site yourself for updates. When new information appears on a news site from an RSS enabled Web site such as the New York Times, BBC World News, or Wired , you are automatically updated and your RSS reader alerts you of the new content.
A reader will also keep track of what you have already seen which saves you even more time since you no longer need to search through your favorite sites for new stories. RSS news freaks can scan literally hundreds of such feeds each day. All kinds of stuff is available via RSS so that you can track the weather in Pago Pago, the LA Times entertainment page, comics such as Work Sucks, sports feeds from ESPN and a virtually unlimited number of blogs. You can even get updated on Podcasts.
There are a couple of ways to add a new feed to your RSS reader.
Most of the readers such as Awasu (www.awasu.com) have built in lists of sites that you can click on to add to your collection. Or you can simply go to the Web site of your choice and look for an orange buttonlabeled "XML" which corresponds to the live Web page that is serving up the content. By pasting that URL to your RSS reader you can enable that Web page to be part of your RSS list.
Sound complicated? It's a little trickier than it should be, but I'm certain this process will get easier as RSS becomes more mainstream and the guys at Microsoft get around to providing Internet Explorer with its own built-in RSS reader. Firefox and Apple's Safari already have this feature.
Some news readers such as Feedster (www.feedster.com) or Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) don't require special software to allow you to capture RSS. They are Web sites that enable you to subscribe to, and search, RSS feeds.
Whatever way you choose, if you're a news fanatic like me you'll really appreciate RSS.
