Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Making your Internet experience more effective by subscribing to information

Are you one of those guys whom read news on-line daily? I read massive amounts of articles, blog posts, Facebook updates, Linkedin.com updates and more. Recently I had a week which consisted of masses of writing and other assignments such as presentations, seminar groups and more. I found out that I had to get more effective in the way I use the net.
I spend a lot of time on "scanning" pages for news that I want to read about. I often read just the headings. Subscription via RSS feeds was the solution for me. With RSS you can subscribe to information from various sources and a RSS reader can give you a list of updates from your chosen sources.

What is RSS?

RSS have been along for a long time and over the years many websites have started to publish such feeds. RSS is a way of subscribing to information like newspapers, blogs, Facebook updates and other stuff. RSS often give you the heading of an article and the introduction. This is often enough to interpret the contents of the article.

For more technical information about RSS you can see the Wikipedia article about RSS at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

How do RSS work?

Most websites publish their articles in HTML format, a format that your web browser changes into something useful like the article that you are read now. Websites can also publish in a RSS format which is meant to be read by computers. RSS readers like Google Reader can read RSS feeds and turn it into something that you can read. By subscribing to RSS feeds you can get a RSS reader to create a list from multiple sources of information. Example: You add Cnn.com's RSS feed, you add the RSS of author Nicholas Carr at roughtype.com. Google Reader will then give you the latest headlines from both sources.

Main benefits with RSS
- Keeps you updated with sources that are not often updated. Example: Blogs of famous person that might only have a few posts a month. RSS feeds give you them directly without checking the website
- Not having to open several web pages. Everything is added to a single page where you can read the things that you want.
- You get a more effective experience and read more and use less time at finding information.

Disadvantages with RSS
- In my experience with RSS feeds in Google Reader items are not always published constantly in the RSS feed as on the external website.
- Over subscribing can give you too much to read. Try to subscribe to what matters to you.

Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) a web based RSS reader
There are various RSS readers out there. Some are web based like Google Reader while others are offline applications that do the same job. Wikipedia have a list of "feed aggregators": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregator s
Google Reader is a web based tool for reading RSS feeds. You can add as many RSS feeds as you want and categorize them in folders.
If you want to be seriously effective here is some tricks that can make you even more effective while going through your feeds.

Shortcut keys for Google Reader:

U = Makes your left bar with subscription info go away so you can use the full width of your screen to ready feeds.
J = This gives you the next "unread" item of your feeds.

How can I add RSS feeds? Where are they?
If you use a web browser like Mozilla Firefox you can see a orange icon in the address bar (the bar where you type www.cnn.com for example). You can try this out by going to www.cnn.com. A orange icon will appear to the right in your address bar. Click it and then click on the item that you want. Since cnn.com have several RSS feeds that can subscribe to the menu appears.
The copy the feed address from the into your RSS reader, in this example I used Google Reader. If you use Google Reader you will find the "Add subscription" link to the left on your screen. Click it and the copy the feed address into it.

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