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A celebration of one of the foundations of social media. Plus, a great YouTube RSS tip
Evidently, May 1st is “RSS Awareness Day.” And why not? It’s one of the greatest and most efficient ways to stay informed and manage news. It so dramatically streamlines the process of finding the information that’s important and relevant to you that the Net would be dramatically underutilized if not for the venerable RSS feed. If you’ve not tried it, here’s a quick how-to on our RSS feed.
When you click on the RSS logo in upper right corner of this post (and the site itself), you’re taken to our FeedBurner page. Once here, you select the type of feed you want. For a basic XML feed, click that link. This adds a bookmark in your browser that gives you a drop-down menu of headlines. Instead of coming to the site to see what’s new or interesting, you can quickly see 10 stories or more at a glance and go directly to the one that interests you. The feed is updated in real time, so it’s current whenever you check. This is a prime example of how we can tailor news to come to us, rather than having to search it out and go to it. And that ultimately improves our quality of life.
In the spirit of RSS Day, here’s a little-known tip for YouTube. If you like particular types of videos, you can set up RSS feeds based on their tags. For example, if I want a feed about all videos tagged with “environment”, I enter the following link into my browser: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/environment.rss, which prompts me to save it as a bookmark. Replace the word “environment” with any other tag to create a similar feed. If it’s two words, like climate change, enter it as follows: climate+change (with .rss). Now you can scan new videos by RSS instead of going to YouTube and searching.
Be aware, though, that advertising will soon be coming to an RSS feed near you:
From Wired:
In recent weeks, more companies have started bringing advertising to RSS feeds, the popular platforms for aggregating content from multiple sites in a single place. In the past, RSS feeds have typically been free of ads.
By most accounts, companies, analysts and bloggers have reported little complaint from readers, noting that they can “vote with their feed” simply by unsubscribing.
Companies that are employing advertising in RSS include Topix.net, a news site; Moreover Technologies, a search-services company founded by mass blog publisher Nick Denton; Feedster, a news and blog syndication service; and Weblogs, the parent company of Engadget, a popular tech product blog.
Topix, which began including ads in the content it syndicates to RSS feeds in early October, said it is beginning a month-long experiment testing ads from Overstock.com.
Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, said that with the recent growth of RSS, advertising is likely to stay.
“Folks understand that if there’s not a way to monetize content, there’s not going to be content,” he said.
This is the nature of free content and is not a bad thing, especially if publishers put a priority on feeding relevant RSS ads that can ultimately prove valuable to the user. As this story points out, you can easily unsubscribe by deleting the feed. Unlike email, you are not at the mercy of the provider to delete your address. Again, the control is steadily shifting away from companies and government to consumers and citizens. RSS is just one simple example.
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1 Regator Could Be Your Ticket to the Blogosphere | Max Gladwell // Aug 12, 2008 at 12:57 pm
[...] sung the praises of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) before, specifically on RSS Awareness Day. It’s a fundamental tool in listening to the social web, and there are countless ways to [...]
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