Computer and Library Learning (Archived)

When Apple released the iPad I jumped at the chance to get one. I assumed having everything at my fingertips would make me a more efficient reader. To my great surprise I found after a few weeks that I was getting through less material and worse I was less satisfied by what I had read. After coming to this realization it didn't take me long to figure out why. Using the iPad I was reading in a way I hadn't in years. I was going through the entire magazine or newspaper, reading or skimming everything before moving on. I also found myself returning to a site or news “app” again and again to check for changes. 
In reading like this I was wasting vast amounts of time. I wasted time wading through articles or posts in which I wasn't interested. I wasted even more time returning to check periodically if anything new had been added. I haven't read, electronically at least, like this in many years because of a technology called RSS.

RSS is generally accepted to stand for Really Simple Syndication, though there seems to be some debate about this. RSS lets creators represent their blog or web site as a series or "stream" of changes. For a blog, each addition to the stream might be a new post, for a newspaper web site a new article. Changes can be annotated with information such as a title, time and date and the author. The RSS stream might include the entire change, such as the whole blog post or just a selection with a link to the full post. 

For years now RSS feeds in combination with a RSS feed reader have allowed me to skim through just the headlines of the various articles and blog posts on the sites that I follow, clicking through and reading only what I’m interested in. Feeds also mean I haven't had to keep returning to web sites to check if they’ve changed or updated. Anything new just appears in the feed reader.

Most websites make feeds of their content available, particularly those that update or change frequently. Some sites will have more then one feed. News sites might have feeds for different sections, columns or columnists. Most sites indicate they have a feed or feeds by placing the RSS logo somewhere on their site. The logo is often a link to the feed itself, which can be given to a feed reader. In a future post I'll talk about some of the popular feed readers and how to use them to manage the torrent of information that comes at us every day from the Web.