Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window where web matters. I am your Cyberhost, Steven Lang this week taking a look at RSS feeds.

You might have noticed while surfing some sites, particularly news sites, that there is very often a discreet button somewhere on the front page that says something like “RSS version” – “RSS feed” or “ download news to your site”

What is all this about? And what is RSS – more internet jargon? Yes, of course it is, and nobody is completely sure what the letters stand for. Here are some options for RSS –

"Rich Site Summary” - "Really Simple Syndication" or how about “RDF Site Summary."

To complicate matters a little further, there are also up to seven different technical standards that describe themselves as RSS.

But that is the bad news over. Here comes the good stuff.

RSS is a way of syndicating articles to as many other sites that wish to use them.

Still confusing? OK Let’s try to illustrate this with an example. The BBC has several RSS feeds – one for each of its main categories. Now if I have a science web site, I can put the BBC’s RSS feed for science and nature on my web site.

What happens is that I will be putting the BBC’s headlines on my site. If someone wants to read the story associated with the headline – they click on that headline and they are automatically taken to the relevant story on the BBC’s site.

It becomes a symbiotic relationship – I get free BBC headlines on my site and the BBC gets traffic directed to their site from the headline. We all benefit.

But RSS feeds are also useful even if you don’t want to put it onto another web site. You can put various feeds onto a single page for your own information.

Let’s say you are interested in Science, well then you can go to the BBC’s Science feed, then to the New Scientist, Associated press also has a science sections and many others. If ou put all of these feeds together, you will never, ever miss a science story.

How do you collect all the different RSS feeds? I know of two ways – I am sure there are others.

First you need to download a feed aggregator – it is a piece of software that aggregates – collects different feeds. There are several aggregators, almost all of them are free. I have come across - FeedDemon; Rocket ; and a feed reader called feedreader and the one I have installed at my computer in the office – called Sage.

I have not tested the others – but I have heard good things about Rocket – and I am happy with Sage.

On my home computer, I have finally set-up the Thunderbird e-mail client – yes, at home I no longer use Outlook – and Thunderbird has a built in RSS reader- which means that I can read at least the news headlines as if they were e-mail subject lines. To be honest, it still is a little weird reading news on an e-mail client, but maybe I’ll get used to it.

Before we wrap up today’s Cybersurf, let me remind you that you can read this script on the Cybersurf Blog which you will find at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com …. One more time, www.cybersurf.blogspot.com – and incidentally – you can get the Cybersurf blog on an RSS feed too.

For a little extra value, I will add links of sites where you can download an RSS aggregator.

Thanks for listening and remember to keeeeep on surfin.

LINKS:

Try this powerful, easy-to-use RSS news reader for Windows
www.bradsoft.com - RSS News Feeds
Easily Create News Feeds. Real Time Tracking. Try it now.
www.nooked.com Rocket RSS Reader - Free
Read Search Subscribe Track Create Easy to Use, No Download, Fast!
www.rocketinfo.com Free RSS Reader

RSS Feed reader directory