November 7, 2004

Using RSS to Send and Receive Information

By David Strom

One of the best ways these days to stay on top of things is to use RSS, a syndication service that is basically a messaging protocol between you and your favorite Web site. When someone adds content to their server, the site can be configured to send out an RSS message so that you can be notified of this new content. You can pick up these messages in any number of products, called RSS readers, ranging from specialized software tools, combination readers/email clients like Mozilla's
Thunderbird, to Web sites that can aggregate the content such as My.Yahoo.com, NewsGator.com, and Bloglines.com.

For those of you that are old enough to remember, this whole RSS thing sounds annoyingly and cloyingly like what was once called push technology, which was the darling of the digerati back in 1996. Back then we had special software that you could put on your PC and whenever some new content came rolling along from your favorite sites, it would be "pushed" to your PC and you could read it without having to constantly check the sites and root around in your browser to see what was new on that particular site. I had a brief relationship with various push products and kept returning to email as the best notification mechanism for keeping you updated.

However, email as a notification system is patently flawed. For one thing, corporate filters tend to block many lists these days, especially if you have certain words in them or in your subject lines. And people change email addresses faster than anything, so staying on top of your list is always a challenge. That's where RSS comes in handy.

RSS has none of these issues with email filters, at least for now. And I have begun to use it during my day job to keep track of my own sites. You see, we have a huge content repository here at the Electronics Group at CMP. From that content we publish numerous sites, and having the RSS feeds to those sites means I can easily check on my people and see what they have posted for the day, as well as have a neat mechanism for my editors to keep track of what other work they have done. And this is without the crude fuss and bother of having to click around various sites. (My thanks to Stuart Bowen and Rob Keane for making this happen, by the way.) Get the rest of the story here

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