“Yea, I already read that.” and other advantages of RSS feeds

I can’t tell you how many times in a given week a friend sends me a link in email or instant messenger and says, "Dude, did you see this?" It’s probably 1 in 20 that I haven’t already seen. While I was skimming my RSS feeds today I had to laugh. It’s the day after Christmas. It’s 2:43 PM. I have already read about 200 news stories.

Of course I have READ about 25, but I have skimmed the other 175 in my RSS reader, Bloglines.

What is RSS?
For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. I am hoping that you have already heard of it, if not the concept is simple. On news sites or blog sites like mine, all of the content is available in a feed. That means with any of a number of reader programs, you can subscribe to my content and the content of many other sites and read it all in one place. You can also search it, skim it, summarize it and with tools like Yahoo Pipes, you can aggregate it, translate it and twist it every which way but loose….right turn Clyde

So in my handy reader I have 56 website feeds that I view pretty much every day. Beyond the obvious luminaries like Digg, CNET, Engadget and Gizmodo, I also have plenty of smaller sites that I enjoy reading.

When you add in the latest tech blogs from the people who create the software we use every day, I get a lot of information very quick.

If you aren’t already a feeder, I encourage you to get Bloglines, Google Reader or a variety of other client RSS readers like Outlook or Apple Mail and get your feed on. It’s a great way to cut through the crap and get the news you want in the way you want it.

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