Since I’ve started working a corporate job, my face-to-monitor time has increased substantially, and with it many more minutes of surfing the Internet. During this time, I actually found a strange need to find factual information on the Internet.
Eventually, this led me to the belief that televised and printed news media are fast reaching their crux of usefulness.
I don’t expect that mindlessly stumbling through the World Wide Web via Google or Yahoo or whatever you choose will bring about this end. No, the end of prescribed news will come at the hands of technologies such as RSS.
RSS is an acronym that has approximately seven different definitions for a technology that has approximately seven different styles of implementation. Through all of this definition infighting, however, the point of all things RSS is to deliver chunks of content to an end-user in a manner similar to subscribing to a magazine. For instance, let’s say you have a favorite blog or news site that you enjoy reading—like The Polytechnic online—and so check it daily. Chances are you might miss a post or a news story, as no one can constantly check sites for updates, nor might you really want to.
If, however, the site which hosts the content has an RSS feed available, and you have the appropriate software, you have quite a bit of power at your disposal. Subscribing to the feed will give you the ability to not only receive all updates without so much as another click, but you can compare the information from that site to many others as easily as browsing two email messages from within two different folders—think Outlook.
All you need is an RSS aggregator, which comes in either a downloadable form, like the program SharpReader, or as a web-based client, such as the website Bloglines. Armed with this, simply find sites with a small, usually orange button simply labeled “RSS”, and click it. This will guide you to the RSS feed for the page. To subscribe to this feed, copy the URL and paste it into the appropriate part of your aggregator to take advantage of the aforementioned update service, free of charge, so long as the content is also free.
I bet you’re still wondering, “But Poly, where does the end of ‘old school’ media come? Why such a gloomy future for our most-beloved campus periodical?” Well good reader, once this technology becomes incorporated in major browsers and computer packages—it will—with some example subscriptions included, there will be little reason for magazines or papers to be printed.
As an affordable and mostly free distribution method, with a much larger audience available, this would be a well-chosen path for publishers to take. For the end-user, the benefits come from the easy, intuitive method of choosing and filtering their content subscriptions from literally thousands or millions of different sources.
If you thought channel surfing was easy, try RSS.
