i’ve seen those orange xml buttons around for the longest time, and i knew it meant that the site supported really simple syndication (rss) but i never got around to actually trying them out or seeing if it’s useful. the reason being, i usually surf around the web as a form of procrastination from school or work, so i don’t really need a single place to read all my blogs and news sites. plus, i didn’t think i needed yet another internet application running all the time.

rss has really hit the big time now that it’s supported out of the box in firefox and thunderbird, you just import all your rss feeds and you can browse rss. i didn’t like the user model in either firefox or thunderbird, so i got a third party applciation and gave it a whirl. i went through the blogs i had bookmarked and surprisingly, more than 75% of them have rss feeds (you can enable the option in blogger) so i added them and tried it out.

it actually worked out pretty well, the application i was using had a similar layout as thunderbird in that there is a sidebar for sites (analog to folders), a top area for new entries (like messages) and a preview pane for the content. what i don’t like about thunderbird is that you have separate folders for each feed, but in other applications you can group them together so you can view many feeds at once.

i think i’ll give rss feeds a chance. it seems like a great tool if you tend to visit sites that don’t really update; you just pop their feeds into your reader and the reader will take care of figuring out when those people do update so you don’t have to continually visit their site. on the other hand, i found that most sites syndicate their entire post so for sites that update frequently, you can just read all their content through the reader and never have to visit their site; which means less ad revenue and hits. so you see sites like xanga who don’t have any feeds for their users because they want to promote the community aspect of their site, where as more mainstream blogging sites like livejournal and blogger do support feeds.

anyways, it’s a nice technology which still has some problems (such as bandwidth usage) but worth it to give it a try.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: webgeek