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The web is a smorgasbord of content, and search engines have helped us to separate the wheat from the chaff, keeping relevant information at our fingertips.
But now that you’ve amassed a long list of bookmarks ranging from blogs to online social networks, a new predicament pops up — it becomes a bother to keep up with the freshest content as you trawl through websites one by one, repeatedly clicking on your browser’s “Refresh” button to display the most recent updates.
There’s a better way to sift through your collection of websites efficiently: RSS.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. Using the RSS format, websites churn out a web feed so that the latest updates can be distributed easily.
RSS has been around as far back as 1999, but its use has gained momentumover the past few years thanks to its ability to push out a wide range of feeds, such as news headlines, sports scores, images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, podcasts, stock prices, the latest events from your Google Calendar, blog posts and even weather forecasts.
What’s golden about RSS is that you can gather and display your chosen web feeds on a central location. With such content aggregation, feeds will be delivered to you automatically. You can subscribe to web feeds on personal web portals such as iGoogle or MyYahoo!, web browsers and even email applications such as Thunderbird or Apple’s Mail.
But we prefer using a dedicated RSS reader to aggregate our feeds. A reader helps us to manage information overload by letting us scan headlines fast and clicking only on relevant links.
To get you started on using web feeds, here are TODAY’s picks of free RSS readers, both web-based and desktop-based.
MAC-BASED RSS READER
NewsFire www.newsfirerss.com
Simplicity, eye candy and functionality are very much the hallmark of polished software for the Mac, and NewsFire shines in these areas.
Not only can you organise feeds in the typical folder system but you can also tag the folders with colours, making it easier to differentiate them.
In addition, NewsFire has “smart” folders that let you group feeds or items by a certain criteria. You could, for example, make a folder that automatically lists all items in any web feeds that contain the word “Apple”.
And, it’s oh-so-slick. The latest item in a feed doesn’t simply move to the top of the list, it floats. Smooth, NewsFire, very smooth.
Alternatives:
Netnewswire www.newsgator.com/individuals/netnewswire
Vienna www.vienna-rss.org
WINDOWS-BASED RSS READER
FeedDemon www.feeddemon.com
Most RSS readers for Windows are mediocre and rarely match up to their Mac brethren in bothlooks and usability. One wonders why there are so few big fishes for RSS in a sea of Windows applications.
In this regard, FeedDemon is quite the catch. It has a simple setup for RSS newbies and a long list of features to satisfy advanced users. This includes search, different viewing styles and offline storage of feeds so you can read your content when you’re disconnected. You can also synchronise your feeds to NewsGator Online, a free web-based RSS reader, which makes it easy for you to track your feeds remotely on any computer.
Alternatives:
RSS Bandit www.rssbandit.org
RSS Owl www.rssowl.org
WEB-BASED RSS READER
Google Reader google.com/reader
Google Reader is much more than an online rehash of an RSS reader. Its obvious advantage is that you can access your feeds on any Internet-connected computer. But Google Reader also works offline — you just need to install Google Gears (a browser plugin that allows you to run web applications offline) on Internet Explorer or Firefox. Mac users will need to use Firefox for this, since Google Gears isn’t available yet for the Safari browser.
Google Reader has a minimal and fast interface. It updates your feeds dynamically, without a browser refresh, and boasts a search feature.
You can also share items from your feeds easily with other Google Reader users. And, you can use keyboard shortcuts here. For example, tap on the spacebar to move from one unread item to another.
Google Reader scales down elegantly on mobile phones (especially on the iPhone), not compromising ease of use and speed even on mobile browsers.
But what we think truly sets it apart from other feed readers is its Trends feature, which can tell you how many items you’ve read over a period of time, which feeds you read the most and which feeds are inactive or frequently updated.
These statistics help you to manage your feeds so you can tell which ones you follow the most and remove those that you rarely read or the ones that don’t update frequently enough. You can also spot feeds that update too much — a sign that it could be feeding you with needless information.
Trust us, when you start relying on RSS feeds as a central source of online information, it pays to have tools like this to help you practise some prudence.
Alternatives:
Bloglines www.bloglines.com
Newsgator Online www.newsgator.com/individuals/newsgatoronline
CONTENT AGGREGATION WITHOUT AGGRAVATION
If the notion of RSS still intimidates you, Alltop (alltop.com) hopes to ease your pain by aggregating web feeds on its website.
Alltop’s goal is to provide ‘aggregation without aggravation’ and is easy enough for non-techies to reap the benefits of RSS without actually delving into the technology.
What it does is hand-pick the top sites on the web, categorising them by topic and listing the five latest headlines from their feeds. Hovering your mouse pointer over a headline will display the first paragraph of the story.
“The model we use is a magazine rack: We gather all the subscriptions so that people can easily read about the topics that interest them. They don’t have to do the finding and subscribing. We’ve done it for them,” said Mr Guy Kawasaki, one of the co-founders of Alltop.
Mr Kawasaki is no stranger to Silicon Valley, being a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund, andwas also once Apple’s software evangelist.
Alltop currently covers about 80 topics and new topics pop up every few weeks, ranging from art to personal finance.The site aggregates about 7,000 sites and blogs.
Although its critics have said that Alltop doesn’t add anything new to the concept of web portals, we like the fact that, in an age of algorithms and analytics, the site takes a more personal approach to picking web feeds.
“We are subjective and don’t utilise any voting mechanism like Digg,” explained Mr Kawasaki. “We include sites that we like and the sites and blogs that people we like, like.”
Interestingly enough, he added that the single most important source for feeds has been from the community on Twitter (twitter.com), the micro-blogging Internet service.
Alltop’s intuitive interface is mostly text-based and its selection of sites filters out much of the mediocrity that prevails on the Internet, making it much like a virtual Wunderkammer – a cyber directory ofwonderful websites. - TODAY/sh
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