Have you ever found a really good web site where great new information was posted regularly? Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of having to go to all of the sites you like to check if there was something new, if that information could just come to you? Wouldn’t it save a lot of time if you could find all of this new information in one place?
Well….you can! You may have seen a button like this and wondered what it was for.
That button is a common symbol for RSS used on the web. What RSS allows you to do is subscribe to web page content so that anytime new information is posted it is delivered to you just like the morning paper. The first step is to set up an RSS reader. Bloglines and Google Reader are two of the most popular, so I would pick one of those. The next step is to find content you want to subscribe to, such as a blog or news website that posts regular content. The final step is to add the link to the site’s RSS feed into your reader. Once you’ve done that you won’t have to go to the web site anymore. When new content is added, it will appear in your RSS reader and you can read it from there.
Here is a video that does a much better job of explaining it:
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When I first started subscribing to sites using RSS it didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. After spending some time using it, though, I began to see how powerful it could be. The ability to connect to constant streams of information around specific topics or interests changes the nature of the web. It allows you to follow ideas and people having conversations around those ideas from all over the world. You don’t have to go searching anymore. You can make the information that you want come to you.
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