The Magic of RSS: Really Simple Syndication for Really Smart Students

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has fundamentally rocked the way that, as consumers, we get information. You may not know the acronym, or know the technology behind it. But, trust me, it has affected your daily consumption of information.

This is not just “online” vs. “offline” – it’s “push” vs. “pull.”

Let me explain.

Since the dawn of information, we’ve been beholden to the all-wise, all-knowing gate keepers to tell us what we need to know; whether it’s editors, PR people, educators and so on.

This is “push.” Read this, listen to that.

With RSS, we now have control over information. We “pull” what we want, when we want and how we want. This has rocked the traditional information providers and opened up a whole new world.

Here, let Common Craft explain it.

To maximize your use of RSS, you need a feed reader. And honestly, finding a good way to keep up on feeds is the best way to keep this social media stuff manageable.

Here are the most popular:

Google Reader: I’ve never loved Google Reader, but it’s often the one I recommend for students who are comfortable with the Google interface. I think there’s too much extra stuff going on with the page outside of my feeds.

Bloglines: For its ups and downs, I seem to keep coming back to Bloglines. Likely, that’s partially because that’s what I cut my RSS teeth on and what I’m used to. But when I compare it to some of the others on this list, it feels cleaner. What I don’t like – if you jump out of the feed you’re reading for some reason, that clears the unread posts out.

Flock: Flock is beyond a feedreader, it’s a “social browser.” You can connect to your blog(s), Twitter, Flickr, video and get your feeds all in one place. I do like the interface and its a Mozilla thing, so it works a lot like Firefox. I just can’t quite commit to go all the way with a new browser, so I keep coming back to Bloglines. But this is definitely my second choice.

Netvibes & Pageflakes: Netvibes and Pageflakes are pretty similar. Both are designed to be an “all in one” feedreader and iGoogle-esque home page. I like both. Netvibes imported my feed folders as individual tabs, which is a nice for organizing. The layout of both works nicely. I like the feedreader part better than Google Reader, so these are a nice alternate to iGoogle.

Tips for making feed reading a habit you can manage.

• Make your feed reader your home page – open a browser, greet your feeds. That seems easy enough.
• Add browser button as a visual reminder – I have my bloglines button at the top of my Firefox browser, so it’s just within my vision to remind me that I need to see what’s up. I have to admit that creating the habit didn’t take long and now I’m as dependent on Twitter as I am the feed reader.
• Set an outlook or other email reminder service to jog your memory once a day – if you’re reading any more than a couple of dozen blogs, you need to stay on top of it and check daily. Especially when you’re starting out. As you get in the groove, you can find your own rhythm. If I wait more than a couple of days, I have hundreds of posts to catch up on.
• Use your reader + a social bookmarking application – if I only have time to scan, I’ll scan headlines, open posts that look interesting and tag them in Delicious. Then later, I can hit the highpoints and read the things that really caught my eye.

For those veterans of RSS feed readers… any tips for the newbies?