What is RSS and how do I use it?

Born out of my frustration with the way that RSS is talked about and “taught” by most websites, I originally had written this article as a guide for users of the Rockford Area Economic Development Council’s website how to make use of their RSS feeds. I’ve since updated it and this is my version.
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Chances are, in the course of browsing a news story online, you’ve seen the little orange buttons out there, that say XML, or RSS, or maybe you’ve seen a button with a radio wave icon on it, and they say subscribe to our RSS Feed, and you click it and maybe you get some computer gobbledygook that doesn’t make any sense to you at all. And if you are like the vast majority of computer users out there, at that point, you will simply throw up your hands and walk away.

And who can blame you? After all, although all of the major news organizations — CNN, the BBC, NPR, the networks, the newspapers — make RSS or XML available to you, none of them make it easy for you to understand or use, much less exploit this new technology. And a 2004 Ipsos Insight White Paper on RSS, commissioned by Yahoo, proves this point. Almost 7 out of every 8 internet users say they don’t know anything about RSS. Of those who have, only 4% know about it and are actively using it. When pressed a little bit, another 27% have been using RSS all this time but didn’t know that they were.

Well, I’m fed up with not knowing this stuff too, and fed up with half-hearted explanations, full of technobabble, from the experts about the stuff. I can’t stand it. I mean, just how does this stuff fit into your life? How can this little orange button help you help yourself? Why is this even here in the first place? Why why why? It should not be so difficult to figure it all out, and in fact, as I’ll demonstrate here, it isn’t. I haven’t found any satisfactory answers to these questions, so I’ve taken it upon myself to write my own.

I’m going to make two promises right here and now about this technology. The first is, as busy as you are, RSS is a technology that will make it quicker and easier for you to find and keep on top of the latest news and information that’s important to you. In fact, the busier you are, and the more time you spend online trying to stay on top of the information overload, the more closely you should take a look at using RSS just to stay on top of the news. If you invest a little time here today, based on what I know about most people’s current browsing habits, it will pay for itself in dividends on your time and attention.

The second promise is, by the time you are done reading this article, if you have followed the examples, you will be no longer be part of the 96% who say that don’t know about and don’t use RSS. You will be part of that elite 4% of all internet users that know what it is and how it fits into their lives and actively use it. And not only that: you will be able to tell others how to use it, and they will be able to, and so on. How will we accomplish this?

In this article, I’m going to break down this RSS technology for you into a few easy steps. I’m going to describe RSS in terms of the problem the technology was designed to solve. Then I’m going to outline the basic process for using it, and finally, we’ll go live by showing you how to use it, using three commonly available, free tools: Firefox and Sage, Bloglines, and My Yahoo. As a related case, we’ll also use Google’s RSS tools.

Let’s get started. Since I hate technobabble, let’s talk first about the problem RSS was designed to solve.

Just what is this RSS thing anyway?

In the beginning, when the web was new, it wasn’t so hard to stay on top of the latest news and information. To begin with, there weren’t so many websites, and when they were updated, which was infrequently, you could just go to each one in turn and be relatively up-to-date. You would bookmark the sites you regularly visited, maybe even organized your bookmarks into folders. And then later on that week, you would do this again by revisiting those bookmarks so you could stay current.

In the present day, however, as the number of websites and information sources has multiplied, exponentially, so have the pressures on your time. Now, just to surf the web is a full-time job in and of itself. Think about it: you have so many more websites to go to. In many cases, they are now being updated up to the minute. Even if you were to go to each one, search through the site for the news and information relevant to you, read them to see if it is relevant, and to keep doing this regularly enough that you can stay on top of the latest and greatest is now a Sisyphean task: the rock of information keeps rolling back down the hill no matter how many times you push it back up to the top. In fact, as soon as you get that info boulder up the hill, it’s already sliding back down. You don’t want that. You want to get the rock up the hill and make sure it stays there, with you on top of it, but how?

Enter RSS. And now it’s time to play a little Let’s Pretend game. You remember that pile of website bookmarks, the ones you had so carefully collected and nurtured over the years, and put away into folders for the time you would need them? The way to think about RSS is, it is like those bookmarks, but with a difference. What if those bookmarks could tell you when the site has been updated, instead of you chasing down each website to check to see if they had been updated?

And what if those bookmarks were just for a particular section or type of story on a website that you were interested in, so that it would show you only the most recent news or information for that section alone, instead of you searching and searching to find just the stories you were interested in?

And what if, instead of you going to visit that site, and the twenty other sites that you had bookmarked, one after the other, that only the news and info you were interested in, from those websites, came to you, instead?

That is what RSS is.

Coming soon: Okay, I get it, now how do I use this stuff?