Internet Changes Everything

PluggedIn: RSS Readers Offer New Ways to Read the Web

Yahoo! News - PluggedIn: RSS Readers Offer New Ways to Read the Web

Sat Mar 27, 7:32 AM
By Reed Stevenson
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Noticed those little orange boxes on the Web lately with the letters "XML?"

It's not a mystery or an obscure engineering feature, but rather a new way to get news and information delivered to your PC without having to browse through page after page of Internet sites.

Called RSS, for Really Simple Syndication, these feeds are used to send information across the Internet using XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, the de facto new standard in formatting Web pages and information to be sent over networks.

"Technology has made more information available more readily," said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover, one of the architects of RSS, also shorthand for Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. "But on the Internet the access time to get to that information has been greatly reduced."

To make it easier to read, or at least scan a lot more headlines in much less time, new software programs called RSS readers have been proliferating on the Web.

SharpReader, available at http://www.sharpreader.net, is a Windows-based application that monitors RSS feeds and dishes up instant messaging-style notices of incoming headlines, which can be read in a window resembling an e-mail program.

In most cases, incoming RSS items provide links that take the user directly to the full article or posting on a provider's Web site.

The feeds can be set up by simply copying a Web address into an RSS reader.

RSS readers aren't limited to desktop programs, however.

There's also a version that can be built into Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Outlook organizer called Newsgator, at http://www.newsgator.com, which makes reading RSS feeds as simple as reading e-mail.

For those who want to monitor RSS feeds without installing new software on PCs, a variety of Web sites have also popped up that allow users to create their own lists of RSS feeds to monitor over the Web.

NOT ONLY NEWS

Users can subscribe to syndicated feeds from a variety of sources -- The New York Times, for example -- but RSS feeds also help keep track of online weblog postings and even product announcements.

Bloggers, or online journal keepers, use RSS extensively to monitor each other's postings and most popular blogging programs include automated RSS feeds.

And recently, Amazon.com Inc. (NasdaqNM:AMZN - news) began offering RSS feeds of dozens of product categories that allow Web shoppers to stay up-to-date on the Web retailer's latest offerings and deals.

"We're really helping users to be able to discover Amazon products in a whole new way," said Jeff Barr, technical program manager at Seattle-based Amazon.

Amazon also encourages Web developers to use RSS feeds and XML to create their own storefronts, for which they can receive a commission for products that shoppers choose to purchase by going through their Web sites.

Although online feeds, also called syndications, are becoming increasingly popular, identifying and choosing the right programs and versions can be tricky.

There's a separate version, Atom, that is also widely used, though many RSS readers are being designed to handle both. Atom provides essentially the same services based on a slightly different structure, which in most cases is invisible to the end-user.

Still, many are convinced that RSS is here to stay.

Many companies have big plans to develop RSS, which many expect to become a ubiquitously available technology.

March 27, 2004 at 12:13 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home