Get Your RSS On

Published by Blake Macleod | Filed under How To, Technology

A number of my friends have asked me how I stay informed with what is going on in the tech industry. The answer is simple. RSS. For some of you RSS or Real Simple Syndication is utilized everyday in extremely creative ways, however, for most of my readers, RSS is simply three letters that are way to techie to have any influence in their life. Well to all my readers who feel the later, now is time to change.

According to Wikipedia RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. So what does that mean to you? I think the best way to answer that question is to tell you how I use RSS to simplify my everyday life.

The main way I use RSS is to aggregate the news that I care about. My mother thinks that I am crazy because I do not subscribe to a local newspaper. But what she does not know is that the way I read the news is so much more targeted to my interests than the Trib or the Times could ever be. And truthfully, I think she is crazy for paying money for a newspaper. Here’s what I do.

I use NetVibes to aggregate my feeds. There are many other feed readers like iGoogle and my Yahoo, But I chose Netvibes after reading a Business 2.0 article about it. Well this post is not about RSS Readers, it is about RSS, so lets continue. What Netvibes does is allow you to organize your feeds into different pages. My Pages are General, Sports, Technology and Financial. Try to keep your pages to a minimum. If you have too many pages you will not read them all… at least I don’t.

Ok, here is the break down. General is where I have my “newspaper” feeds like The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun Times, The NY Times, USA Today and other traditional news like CNN Money are stored. This give me my local news, National News and Financial News. I also have a weather widget so I can see what the four day forecast is for Chicago.

On my Sports Page I have feeds from all the Chicago Sports Teams websites (Bears, Cubs, Bulls, Hawks) as well as the headlines from CBSsportsline and ESPN. This give me in depth coverage of the teams I care about plus all the other important news from the sports world.

Finally, The Technology Page is the page that read the most. This is the news about my industry therefore the stories are most relevant to my interests. Check out the side bar of this blog to get a feeling for the blogs that I read here. I feel out of the loop if I do not access this page at least once a day. But most days I read the Technology page a couple of times.

Financial tracks some Venture Capital firms blogs… I find them to be very insightful. Also New Tab 4 in the above picture is a place where I run RSS filter experiments. It is called New Tab 4 because of pure laziness. That is getting off topic… more on that later.

That is how RSS helps me stay on top of all the news that I think is important.

How else can one use RSS? Well this is the part of the post that could go on forever, but again I will outline a couple uses I find helpful. First and foremost, look at my sidebar and you will see My Twitter, My Flickr, My Diggs and My Yelp’s. All of this information is pulled off of their respected site and placed onto coldChicago.com without any updating on my part. So, for example, I read stories on DIGG. When I see a story that I like, I DIGG it and it is saved on my DIGG profile as news that I DUGG. DIGG generated an RSS feed for that list of news stories. This is what the feed URL Looks like http://digg.com/users/bmacleod/history/diggs.rss. So where you see ‘bmacled’ you could substitute your DIGG username and send your DUGG stories anywhere that you might find useful. Likewise, when I upload new photo’s to Flickr, my Flickr feed updates thus changing what is displayed on coldChicago.com. Once the feed is set up, you do not need to do any updating. That is what makes RSS amazing.

What I mention above is just the surface of possible applications for RSS. I think anyone that is not utilizing RSS is at an unbelievable competitive disadvantage. So go set up an RSS Reader account somewhere and start letting the news that matters to you come to you. And if you really want to get techie with it, try using Yahoo Pipes to customize your feeds. More on that in a latter post.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments, I would be more than happy to help you start utilizing RSS to simplify your life.