RSS (Really Simple Syndication) etcetera
19/01/09 08:45 Filed in: Business Tech
So…you want to keep up with all of your business and personal news, events, and happenings. But grabbing e-mails (including wading through the junk spam and Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Some Stupid Chain Email) bouncing from web site to web site and wading through all the advertisement and other page clutter is making your task take way too much time. Well…there is a solution…RSS.
Actually, there are several technology solutions–including RSS–that pretty much do the same thing. That is they allow you to subscribe to a source of desired information and have the updated sent to a specific place that you want. For example, let us say that we need to keep up on technology news, for whatever reason. There may be a list of web sites like:
MacsimumNews
InfoWorld
ComputerWorld
Ars Technia
Wall Street Journal
the list an go on…
Bouncing to each one of these can take quite a bit of time. Subscribing to the RSS feeds for each one of these journals allows you to collect all of the headlines in one place and be able to search/sort/filter them to your specific needs. And you do all of this without needing load full web pages (including all that Flash). You can just browse a list and pick the articles that you want to read more of.
Take a look at some of my RSS feeds:
As you can see, I have a number of new articles that I have not been through yet. To look through all of this potential information just using the brower approach would mean a very large amount of scrolling through all kinds of information. Now take a look at what I see when I am looking for articles of interest:
You can see that I have a list of titles and a summary of the article. As I find articles of interest, I have my RSS reader (also called a News Reader) set to when I double-click an article in the list, it opens the full article in my browser but behind my RSS reader. This way my workflow is a smooth one of finding articles of interest and then going through them in detail after I’ve collected the ones that I want to read. Doing this means that finding articles of interest for dozens of subscriptions takes on minutes. And as new articles are published I can see the counters move up and I know if I should take a few more minutes throughout the day see what is happening.
The same thing can happen with your schedule. Many places offer XML or ICS links. This will put events into either your RSS reader or your personal calendar automatically. Should I need to be up-to-date with the schedule of events at a conference, I can use their ICS link to have the schedule changes automatically reflected in my personal calendar. Now, for a mobile device believer/user like I am, this is very, very effective.
If you would assistance in implementing RSS into your workflow–from either the provider or receiver perspective, then contact us. We are happy and excited to help with implementing this very useful technology into your personal, group, or organization daily processes. In fact, you should notice that this blog page uses RSS.
Actually, there are several technology solutions–including RSS–that pretty much do the same thing. That is they allow you to subscribe to a source of desired information and have the updated sent to a specific place that you want. For example, let us say that we need to keep up on technology news, for whatever reason. There may be a list of web sites like:
MacsimumNews
InfoWorld
ComputerWorld
Ars Technia
Wall Street Journal
the list an go on…
Bouncing to each one of these can take quite a bit of time. Subscribing to the RSS feeds for each one of these journals allows you to collect all of the headlines in one place and be able to search/sort/filter them to your specific needs. And you do all of this without needing load full web pages (including all that Flash). You can just browse a list and pick the articles that you want to read more of.
Take a look at some of my RSS feeds:
As you can see, I have a number of new articles that I have not been through yet. To look through all of this potential information just using the brower approach would mean a very large amount of scrolling through all kinds of information. Now take a look at what I see when I am looking for articles of interest:
You can see that I have a list of titles and a summary of the article. As I find articles of interest, I have my RSS reader (also called a News Reader) set to when I double-click an article in the list, it opens the full article in my browser but behind my RSS reader. This way my workflow is a smooth one of finding articles of interest and then going through them in detail after I’ve collected the ones that I want to read. Doing this means that finding articles of interest for dozens of subscriptions takes on minutes. And as new articles are published I can see the counters move up and I know if I should take a few more minutes throughout the day see what is happening.
The same thing can happen with your schedule. Many places offer XML or ICS links. This will put events into either your RSS reader or your personal calendar automatically. Should I need to be up-to-date with the schedule of events at a conference, I can use their ICS link to have the schedule changes automatically reflected in my personal calendar. Now, for a mobile device believer/user like I am, this is very, very effective.
If you would assistance in implementing RSS into your workflow–from either the provider or receiver perspective, then contact us. We are happy and excited to help with implementing this very useful technology into your personal, group, or organization daily processes. In fact, you should notice that this blog page uses RSS.