March 06, 2003

RSS moves into mainstream

The Washington Post's Leslie Walker writes about RSS and newsreaders in Hot Off Your News Clicking Service. This might be the first RSS article I've seen that's aimed at the non-nerd. This is a good thing, as the software she describes can be a real boon to all sorts of people. To quote:

And as useful as they are, I see news-readers as adjuncts, not replacements, for Web browsers. The idea isn't to divert you from Web sites as much as to let you scan more sites. I suspect we will always want to take the time to visit our favorite Web sites.

For one thing, stripping the graphics and layout from sites and extracting just headlines means you lose important visual cues about what the site creators deemed most important. For that reason alone, I'm not ready to give up my bookmarks. I still visit more than a dozen sites daily, then let news-readers scan another 100 to 200 and present me with headlines.

I think the key here is that she can scan a couple of hundred additional sites each day. At one point, I can remember spending a good deal of time going from website to website to keep up on technology news. With RSS and a newsreader (Like NetNewsWire) I can scan dozens of sites (I have over 40 in my NetNewsWire) in a matter of minutes. Very cool.