As I was adding the new RSS feed page the other day, I realized that not everyone understands what RSS feeds are all about. Yesterday I told Alice "I'm putting up an RSS feed page, is there anything you'd like on it?" Her reply was "What's an RSS feed?" So what is an RSS feed and why should you care?

Follow up:

Push vs. Pull:
Back in the early 1990's people started talking about a new way to use the internet - "push technology". The idea was simple: send stuff to the user without them having to ask for it. Pointcast Network was the driving force then, allowing you to get data feeds of news and stock prices. Some email systems like the one used on Blackberry devices use this now, the server telling you when you have new mail. Most other email systems only seem this way, however, since you actually have to peridocally reach out and ask ("pull") if you've got mail.

Pointcast and push have since faded, but automated pull has taken its place with RSS and Atom. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and Atom is a similar competing format. Syndication is simply making content available for use in many places, like a comic strip which appears in many different newspapers. What RSS and Atom do is provide a framework for the distribution of content between a single source and multiple recipients. Many websites and blogs provide feeds to automate the distribution of their content. RSS is so far winning the syndication format wars because it was the first to allow enclosures of audio and video content which led to 'podcasting' - the syndicated distribution of rich media content.

So... why should you care about any of this? That's easy to answer. The web is a big place with constantly changing content. The web page you visited yesterday or last week has new information which you may be interested in browsing. It is much easier to visit one site which aggregates news for you. Sites such as Drudge Report, Huffington Post, MyYahoo, and iGoogle, for example, are news aggregators which present you with a compact, efficient, and easily readable news (RSS feed) summary. Most aggregators have inherent bias in which news stories they present, so you visit the ones that support your own inherent biases. I can't resist but to point you to something Rasputin the Mad Monk posted here several weeks ago (A Prison of Oneself). Other aggregators allow you to customize your content, such as iGoogle and MyYahoo. Both are excellent in allowing you full control over both the content and look and feel of the final news site. If you do nothing else after reading this post, I urge you to take a minute, click on Netvibes, Bloglines, MyYahoo or iGoogle and set up a page with news that interests you. Of those 4, Yahoo and Google seem to be a little easier to set up. Netvibes can be overwhelming but has a very rich interface and content selection.

There is no functional difference between a news story on the Drudge Report or Yahoo and a RSS feed from a blog you read; syndicated, distributed content, all at your disposal any time you want. So grab a RSS reader like Feedreader, Newsfire, or Liferea, or set up a web-based aggregator like Bloglines, MyYahoo, or NetVibes. Pick the content you want to follow, add some custom RSS feeds (Jackrabbitscrewball comes to mind *cough*) and enjoy your own personalized newspaper every morning with your coffee.

Let me just finish with the killer app (depending on your perspective) of the decade: Twitter. I don't know if Twitter is push or automated pull but it doesn't matter. Twitter is a distributed news feed with just two differences: all news is limited to 140 characters and it is designed to be both read and generated from mobile devices. Regular people send tweets. Bloggers, reporters, celebrities, and companies send tweets too. Tweets are really just distributed content and Twitter is the news reader. The 140 character limit is probably because cellular GSM networks use a control channel that is mostly always connected to a mobile device. The channel uses packets which are 140 bytes in size (1 byte = 8 bits = 1 character). By contrast, SMS messaging uses 7 bits per character and is therefore limited to 160 characters.

There is another difference between a tweet and a RSS content feed. Most RSS feeds contain more serious, thoughtful content while most tweets could be described as "fluff". This isn't a hard and fast rule though, just an observation on how many people use the two technologies differently. Twitter probably should be taken seriously since it offers the benefit of immediacy in a mobile, streamlined 140 character format. Every content stream should be judged on its own merits. After all, Jackrabbitscrewball's outgoing RSS news feed is essentially the same as the outgoing twitter feed.

It won't be long before TweetDeck works as an RSS aggregator too.