* RSS Readers/Aggregators – Not Just For Blogs

You have probably heard about RSS Readers (also called RSS Aggregators) in the context of weblogs (or blogs). Yes, RSS Readers are a great way to read various blogs to which you subscribe. But what you might not know is that a lot of non-blog sites are publishing content (“feeds”) in RSS (an XML-based file format, stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and/or “Rich Site Summary”). So I use an RSS Reader for 1) reading blogs and 2) reading the news.

According to Aaron Swartz (http://blogspace.com/rss/readers), the best RSS readers are:

• Mac OS X: NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
• Windows: SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/)
• Linux: Straw (http://www.nongnu.org/straw/)
• Web: Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/)

The following are some non-blog RSS feeds:

• The New York Times (http://partners.userland.com/nytRss/)
• The Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/tools/rss/)
• Dilbert (http://dwlt.net/tapestry/)
• Others (http://www.rssreader.com/rssfeeds.htm)

A competing XML format is called Atom (http://www.atomenabled.org/), which will likely win the battle for mindshare simply because “Atom” is a cooler name than “RSS.” My weblog includes some of the RSS feeds to which I subscribe (under my “Blogroll”). The orange XML icon is a link to the RSS feed; the text next to the icon is a link to the corresponding HTML page. I believe that we are not far off from having some news sources that are delivered in RSS only — and not in HTML. The world of RSS is an entirely new channel of communication on the Internet, as important as — if not more important than — email and the Web, and more relevant than Usenet. And for now it’s spam-free.

References:

AOL Journals includes blog-like functionality in AOL proprietary online service.
(2004-04-27) (http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5200680.html)

Concerns about XML Readers clogging the Internet.
(2004-04-30) (http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,63264,00.html)

Reuters launches RSS feeds.
(2004-05-07) (http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/07/reuters_rss.html)
(2004-05-07) (http://www.reuters.com/newsrss.jhtml)

Google updates Blogger.
(2004-05-10) (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1590147,00.asp)

Six Apart announces Movable Type v3.0, many complain about the new pricing structure, but cooler heads present rational commentary on MT’s new pricing.
(2004-05-13) (http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml)
(2004-05-14) (http://danbricklin.com/log/2004_04_16.htm#movabletype2)
(2004-05-15) (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002003.html)