June 25, 2004

7:43 AM

RSS Feeds: Why?
I like the idea of feeds, but I haven't found any partcular benefit to them over, say, just visiting their respective websites. Which feeds do you find to be most rewarding -- in and of themselves? And what makes them such a big deal, anyway?
posted by *burp* to (21 comments total)

RSS feeds are a big deal the way reading newsgroups using something like nn was. Especially as compared to, say, reading news using Netscape's or IE's newsreader. I use a standalone RSS reader for the Mac, I don't use Bloglines, and it's FAST. You can sort of get an overview of a lot of sites, really quickly. If you're reading 10-20 sites regularly, that's manageable a lot of different ways, but once you start tackling 50 or 100, having an RSS reader is really useful. Basically, you can do a quick browse in a fast-like-text interface, and then click through to what you want to read more in-depth by loading the web page. No more click-and-wait for people's web pages to load. No more ugly ugly web sites. No more sites that render like crap in your browser. It makes it easier to sort of get a zeitgeist of a topic and figure out how you want to read more about it.

I still read my friends' blogs, but for topics that I just want to make sure I'm keeping current on I can browse what's new in those areas and read the articles that look like they cover the story the best. EFF has a good blog, along with Copyfight, Freedom to Tinker, Lessig, and the like, I pull all those feeds into one folder and read them interfiled, I have one called just "library news" that has lisnews's feed and a few other blogs that have announcements from the library world... So many bloggy sites link to essentially the same content, as well as each other, it's good to pick and choose. There's definitely downsides, like missing a lot of sidebar content [some sites, like randomwalks include sidebar links in their feed], design elements, and comments. Plus, the feeds can sort of loom and seem a bit daunting if you stay away from them a while ["you have 200 unread posts!"] in a way that bookmarks don't. I'm a realitively new convert and I definitely have two sets of sites I follow, ones that I like to read via RSS, and ones I still click through to.
posted by jessamyn at 8:01 AM on June 25, 2004

You get told when updates come out. The big deal is, it changes the whole nature of the web: It really drives home the fact that blogs, webzines and such are updated continuously. It doesn't mean as much when you're only checking the site at intervals anyway, but it drives home the dynamic thing by allowing for "news flash" type updates on the printed (displayed :P) word, a previously totally static medium.
posted by abcde at 8:06 AM on June 25, 2004

Same exact reason as jessamyn. I used to have a daily list of websites that I visited every morning at work, but I don't have time anymore. RSS feeds let me keep up with all the information I want to keep up with. I have probably 300 feeds that I skim through every day. I can quickly read the posts or their titles, and open them up if I want to read more or comment. I have Firefox setup to open tabs in the background, so I just open about 10-15 posts I'd like to read at a time. Very efficient.
posted by gramcracker at 8:09 AM on June 25, 2004

While RSS feeds replicate some (or all) of the content of a website, they organize that content very differently.

In my RSS reader, I have a folder dedicated to all of the feeds from the BBC. I can toggle through the headlines and summaries quickly and jump to the full articles for those stories that I find interesting.

I can't scan in this way - well, at least not very easily - on the BBC web pages. It takes longer, I'm distracted by noisy graphics and advertisements, and have to wait for pages to load, etc.

The same is true of all the Mac sites I like to check in on. Rather than visiting each one in turn, I can collapse them all into a big folder of RSS feeds and blaze through them. Much more efficient.

It's this "batching" of feeds that makes RSS so powerful. I can scan through hundreds of pages on dozens of sites in a few minutes. My morning browse then, has been cut from hours (which would certainly get me fired) to about 15 - 20 minutes.

As for which feeds are most rewarding, I'd have to say that news sites are my favorite. The BBC, CS Monitor, and New York Times all offer feeds of their various sections. But for sites like MeFi and BoingBoing I much prefer to simply visit the site - in part because they're already organized like an RSS feed.

Ultimately, I guess it comes down to personal preference. Some people aren't at all impressed by them. Me? I don't think I could live without my RSS. I'm utterly addicted.
posted by aladfar at 8:11 AM on June 25, 2004

I read a number of blogs that have updates only every few days. Before RSS, I would have to go visit each of those blogs every day, to see if they'd been updated. With RSS, I just have to pop open NetNewsWire every morning, to get a nice tidy list of everything new.

The main problem is avoiding the temptation to leave the news reader open all the time, so I'm instantly interrupted in my work every time somebody, uh, asks a new AskMe question...

(Incidentally, reading MetaFilter through the feed is a completely different experience, somehow, from reading it in the blue: Matt's feeds don't include the author of the post, and you don't have (XX comments) subliminally skewing your level of interest in each individual link -- but the link title is much more prominent in the feed than on the site itself. It's like two entirely different websites.)
posted by ook at 8:11 AM on June 25, 2004

In addition to what everyone else said:

RSS stands for something involving "Syndication", which is less and less relevant to what it's used for, but still enormously powerful. It's the technology that powers, for example, HotLinks, which is your one-stop spot for all those wacky sidebar links that are so cool these days. The site pulls RSS feeds from 40 or 50 different sites and presents them in a unified fashion. As a consumer, you don't have to know or care what RSS is to enjoy HotLinks, but it's what makes the site possible.
posted by gleuschk at 8:34 AM on June 25, 2004

RSS feeds offer a diff of the web whenever I check, it says exactly what's new without all the stuff that I already read. Bloglines is also a lot quicker than loading up all the graphics on a bunch of sites.

It acts as a sort of super-bookmarks. Instead of cluttering up my bookmarks and having to go through them all every morning I can just go to one site and it not only remembers my bookmarks, but it tells me exactly what's new.

My email signature even says "If your site doesn't RSS I won't visit twice." This isn't a vain threat to webmasters, it's a simple fact. I cannot remember to check a bunch of sites for updates, so I offload that to my RSS reader. The simple fact is that if your site doesn't play nice with my RSS reader, I don't have the long term memory to keep checking back at your site in case you updated. I don't have anything against sites that don't support RSS but I'm not going to worry about checking them for updates either.

One thing that I think goes really well with feed reading is tabbed browsing. I'm able to go through my updated feeds, open interesting stuff in new tabs and keep reading, building a to-read list in my browser. Then I close my Bloglines tab and am at the first interesting link.
posted by revgeorge at 9:02 AM on June 25, 2004

Pretty much what everybody else said. In general, I'm not a big fan of syndicating all content; my own sites syndicate titles and excerpts. I once tried reading complete posts through a newsreader and hated it. Your mileage will vary, of course, as well as the mileage of the syndicating site.

As a minimalist syndicatee, I use the blo.gs sidebar to keep track of site updates. It's great.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 9:07 AM on June 25, 2004

One more useful function:

I use Bloglines as a feed reader. Because it's centralized, and polling thousands upon thousands of feeds, it becomes a useful repository of "what people are saying about current events", sort of like Technorati or Daypop.

But where this becomes more useful is that I can save a search and it gets treated as a feed item. When I was working at my previous job, a small software company, it was useful to know when people on the web were talking about our products. Since the company name was unique and unlikely to churn up a lot of false hits, I made a search feed for it and was able to see every time we were referenced on RSS-enabled news sites, blogs, what have you.

It allows for instant discovery of relevant links, rather than waiting for google to re-index all the relevant sites - and even then, you're going to have to do carefully drilled searching to find the new links.
posted by Remy at 9:09 AM on June 25, 2004

A (minor) dissenting view: I find that because RSS readers lack the context a webpage delivers that a significant amount of potentially useful information can be, no pun intended, lost in the translation. You're usually restricted to the information a title can convey, or the first couple of sentences of the first paragraph. Unfortunately, it's obvious when you use an RSS reader that the overwhelming majority of content on the Internet is not authored nor edited by professional writers. This is not to say it's not intersting or useful stuff, because it is; it's just a comment that most bloggers don't seem to know how to strucutre their writing so enough information is conveyed via the "shorthand" of RSS.
posted by JollyWanker at 9:12 AM on June 25, 2004

Another use for rss feeds is republishing content however you please, like boingboing lite.
posted by bob sarabia at 9:35 AM on June 25, 2004

The main problem is avoiding the temptation to leave the news reader open all the time, so I'm instantly interrupted in my work every time somebody, uh, asks a new AskMe question...

At the risk of looking like someone who can't walk and chew gum...

Is there a feed for AskMe? I have the regular MeFi feed running, but Ask is one of the few sites which I still have to get to "the old way."

If there were a feed for this (and Romenesko), I think life – at least this little corner of it – would be complete.
posted by baltimore at 9:38 AM on June 25, 2004

ugh, that should be boingboing lite.
posted by bob sarabia at 9:40 AM on June 25, 2004

baltimore: Yeah
posted by Utilitaritron at 9:58 AM on June 25, 2004

I agree with pretty much what everyone has said. I also like the fact that I can save interesting feeds, especially ones from Mefi and AskMe. I love that with PulpFiction I can filter, flag and colour-code links that I want to save, and easily search for the them.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 10:07 AM on June 25, 2004

I have tried (and tried) to get into using syndication for years now, and I just can't do it. For every variation, whether web-based or desktop, the experience is invariably inferior to reading content in the context, both visual and textual, that the original site provides.

Update trackers like blo.gs are in every way a superior solution to the problem of keeping up with a large number of sites that change frequently. You still get notified right when new content is posted, but you don't have to revert to 1980s interface design to do so.
posted by jjg at 10:32 AM on June 25, 2004

Thanks Utilitariton! I think I'd tried that in the past, but it wasn't yet working. Should've tried again before posting, but think of all the others who will learn of the AskRSS feed thanks to my public humiliation...

;)
posted by baltimore at 10:41 AM on June 25, 2004

The RSS feeds for Metafilter, Metatalk and AskMeFi load ahell of a lot faster than the site (which also decreases the overhead on Matt's server).
posted by Mick at 11:05 AM on June 25, 2004

One of the things I enjoy about RSS is the ability to get updates on my laptop in the morning (a couple hundred new posts from overnight) and take it with me on laptop thru out the day, able to catch up even when I'm not necessarily connected to the network.

One problem with this is many feeds only provide the title and maybe an excerpt, which can prove to be frustrating when a connection to the network isn't always an option.

Anyone have any solutions/workarounds for this issue?
posted by mhaw at 12:29 PM on June 25, 2004

No solution, mhaw, but the way I deal with it is that I flag a promising looking entry in my RSS reader (Shrook) and, when I'm reconnected to the net, I open up the Smartgroup that shows only flagged items and click through.
posted by baltimore at 12:47 PM on June 25, 2004

What do you guys recommend as a good newsreader for the PC? In terms of resource overhead, eyecandy or features?
posted by phyrewerx at 11:09 PM on June 25, 2004