Why an RSS Feed Is Your Friend

The Internet used to be a much more static environment. Today, with blogs and news updates occurring minute–by–minute, content changes many times a day, but often in small discrete chunks. A news–breaking headline, a new movie review, a new post to a blog—these are the things the new Internet is made of, small discrete chunks of updated material.

Take my content on this site, for example. To keep up with me you'd need to come on over and visit me a few times a day. (You're more than welcome.) Or, instead, you could subscribe to my content, so that every time I updated it you were automatically updated as well.

These automatic updates are handled through RSS, which stands for "Real Simple Syndication" (there are a few other acronyms as well, but this one is my favorite and the most apt). I do my part by putting my content into RSS format, which means it gets chunked up into discrete sections of information. But don't worry about me, you do your part by subscribing to an RSS reader. In the case of my blog, that would be My Yahoo!

Let's look at how National Public Radio uses RSS feeds. Their content changes often on a number of subjects and you want to be able to get automatic updates on the ones that are important to you.

From the main site, you would choose News Feeds (it has an RSS tag next to it) from the navigation bar on the left side of the screen. Click on the RSS tag.

Once you click on News Feeds you have a big selection of things you can choose to keep track of or not. I like movies, so let's choose Movies (the right column of the screen) and click on the RSS tag next to the words Arts and Culture, which brings me to Movies.

I'm taken to a screen that lets you choose from various RSS readers.

Yahoo's reader is called My Yahoo!, Google's asks you to Add to Google, and so on. One easy reader to use is Bloglines.

By clicking on the Add to My Yahoo! button I've told My Yahoo! to grab the information from NPR's movies every time NPR reviews a new one. Goggle, AOL, Bloglines, and other RSS readers work the same way.

Love the news at CNN or NPR? Want updated scores from ESPN? Want to read your favorite blogger each time they post? Just click the RSS button on their page and pick your RSS reader from their list. Next time you visit your reader, the new content will be waiting for you.