Ain’t jargon fun? RSS is Really Simple Syndication and it’s a simple data-only version
of a Web page or, in the case of a weblog, Web site. Why is that interesting? Because
it’s then easy to write programs that track this XML formatted data stream and let
you know when there’s new material added to the site.

For example, if you were tracking the Ask Dave Taylor RSS data stream then when
this article “went live” on my site, you’d receive notification and be able to read it
within minutes of it arriving. Maybe not so critical for my tech and business Q&A, I
admit, but I also track a number of different business newswires and was reading
about the Proctor & Gamble acquisition of Gillette at least a day prior to my
colleagues. How do I know that? Because they’ve told me that it was my own article
on the subject (P&G buys Gillette for $57 billion, but how much is that in human
terms?) that alerted them to the $54 billion transaction).

Helpful Hint: If you’d like to track an RSS feed and you have a browser with RSS
support, you can click on the cute little XML button you find on many different Web
sites. If your browser doesn’t know what to do with that and instead shows you a
cryptic page of text, you’ll need an RSS reader or aggregator. Keep reading, but
remember that you can also “right click” (or Ctrl-click for you Mac folks) and copy
the link address to your buffer, then paste it into a ’subscribe’ field in your reader.

The problem is, I don’t want to check 100 RSS feeds any more than I want to visit
100 Web sites every day, and that’s where aggregators come in. Whether they’re
standalone programs, plug-ins for your favorite Web browser or email program, or
Web-based services, RSS aggregators remember your subscription list, check each
site on a periodic basis, and alert you to any new articles that have been published.

If you’re not thinking “wow, very cool” then you are spending too much time visiting
Web sites! To scan the headlines of just a dozen sites on an hourly basis would
probably be a full time job and if you need to keep abreast of your industry, as I do,
then you wouldn’t have any time to actually do anything, which would obviously be
deleterious to your career long-term!

So there are programs you can download that are RSS aggregators (or RSS readers,
basically synonymous) for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix systems. A few of the most
popular are BlogExpress and FeedReader for Windows, NetNewsWire and NewsFire
for Macintosh and Lifera for Linux.

Don’t like having yet another application running? You can graft RSS capabilities into
your Web browser (or run Firefox or Safari / Tiger, both of which have elegant built-
in RSS capabilities) or your email program. Notable entries in this category are
NewsGator (grafts into Microsoft Outlook on Windows), Pluck (grafts into Microsoft
Internet Explorer on Windows) and Safari Menu (add-on for Apple’s Safari browser
that includes some RSS support).

Finally, you can subscribe to an RSS aggregator Web service which gives you a
custom Web page that includes the newest information from your hand-picked RSS
feeds. The highest profile solution to this is My Yahoo, which recently announced
support for RSS feeds as additional personal home page information sources,
though it just shows you a rolling ‘latest five articles’ from each source, so it doesn’t
work for me because I’d still be left trying to remember which I’d read or not. Other
possibilities include AmphetaDesk, Bloglines, and Feedster.

Instead of those, however, I use a great Web-based product called NewsGator
Online, which gives me the ability to track as many feeds as I like (fellow blogger
Robert Scoble tracks over 1200 in his NewsGator Online account) along with the
flexibility of keeping in sync at home, in my office and on the road.

Whichever solution you choose, I promise you that once you start traveling down the
road of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators, you won’t turn back. In fact, you’ll find that
every time you go to a Web site that you like, you’ll immediately start hunting for
the “syndicate” or “rss” or “xml” button. i certainly do, and I’m more plugged in now
than I could ever have been in the past.

It’s a rolling sea of information out there, and an RSS aggregator gives you a sail and
GPS navigation system. It might just save your life out there!

Dave Taylor has been involved with the blogging community for years and is widely
respected as an expert on business
blogging, among other areas.