RSS: News You Choose
Why is RSS So Magical? The answer is simple: RSS is news you
choose.
How Does it Work? Publishers and webmasters provide content and
news in an RSS feed. Users view the content of interest in an
RSS reader or news aggregator. The aggregator or reader contains
the collection of feeds that are of interest to the user. As the
RSS feed is updated the content in the reader or aggregator
updates with the new information. At any point, users can remove
a feed from their aggregator or reader and no longer receive
information from that source. Ultimately, the user is choosing
the news and content they wish to view.
As RSS has increased in popularity more and more webmasters and
publishers have adopted RSS as an alternative communication
stream. Webmasters use an RSS graphic to indicate the content is
available via RSS.
RSS Aggregators and News Readers Generally, there are three
types of RSS readers that users use to view feeds that they've
subscribed to. Feeds can be viewed in a desktop application,
web-based aggregator, or plug-in aggregator.
Desktop RSS Readers Standalone desktop applications generally
run in the background, similar to an e-mail client,
automatically refreshing headlines as newfeeds are updated. The
RSS readers collect the feeds and refresh items in the feeds
each time they are updated. An example of a popular standalone
desktop RSS reader is: FeedDemon - http://www.feeddemon.com
Web Based Aggregators Web-based news aggregators are online
services. In simple terms, you can personalize a web page. Each
time that page is accessed or each time you login to the
service, the web page news headlines from feeds that you have
selected will refresh. Examples of popular web-based RSS
aggregators are: SurfPack - http://www.surfpack.com , FeedScout
- http://www.feedscout.com or ActiveWeb Reader -
http://www.deskshare.com/awr.aspx . My.Yahoo even has the option
of including RSS feeds on My.Yahoo start pages.
Plug-in Readers Plug-in news aggregators expand the
functionality of existing applications to allow users to veiw
RSS feeds from within an existing program. Some plug-ins work
with web browsers; others work with e-mail clients. An example
of a plugin is: NewsGator Outlook -
http://www.newsgator.com/outlook.aspx
Websites containing RSS feeds usually have a colorful graphic
indicating the availability of an RSS feed. The graphic is
usually marked 'RSS' or 'XML'. Simply click the graphic and
enter the URL of the file into the reader. Regardless of the RSS
reader or news aggregator used by web surfers, the process of
adding feeds is generally simple. Web surfers need only to enter
the URL of the RSS feed that they wish to view into their news
reader. Each time the reader refreshes the feed the information
contained within the feed is updated and new content in the feed
will appear in the RSS reader.
Finding Feeds In order to find topic-specific feeds, conduct a
search on the RSS search engines available at RSS Specifications
- http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-directory.htm or try RSS
Locator - http://www.rss-locator.com .