Death of RSS? I think not!
What you see above is how I am able to stay current on 350 blogs, yet still get real work done. The above image is a snapshot of Google Reader, my main content hub. I am perusing it every morning with my coffee, every night before bed, and with any bit of free time throughout the day.
According to Wikipedia, RSS is “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works”such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video”in a standardized format.” In laymans terms, it allows you to stay current with all your favorite content sources without having to constantly check them. And this goes beyond blogs, too. My dad, despite having a twitter account, follows my feed in his RSS inbox. That way, all my posts are right in front of him, where he wants them.
There are people all over the web (rss is dead return 123 million hits on google) claiming that RSS is so last year, and that social media is replacing it. However, they are missing a few points:
- Social media does not allow you to follow blogs as closely as RSS does, guaranteeing every post showing up in your reader.
- RSS powers most of the articles that you are finding on the web.
- Using social media to follow content sources such as blogs result in “filter failure”, in a recent episode of “This Week in Google”, the comment was made that the true concern on the web right now is filtering. If you are using Twitter to follow a bunch of people, as well as trying to receive all your news, you will miss things, and will get distracted. You will either see things that need to be replied to, or retweeted, and you will miss the TechCrunch story. To me, this is where RSS shines. You end up with your own personal newspaper that is not only curated by you, but is FULLY searchable. I cannot tell you how often I skim over a story, realize later that I should read it closer, and am able to find it in my Google Reader within 15 seconds.
- It requires less effort. If you are following these sources via social media, you still have to hunt down the post within Twitter or Facebook, whereas with RSS it is all right there.
The way I see it, not only has RSS become a backbone technology for the web, it is still the best way to stay on what is current.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
