posted
Anyone here using RSS feeds to cut back on their web surfing? If so, which ones?
My current list:
Arts: Fireflyfans.net, WHEDONesque, Yahoo! Entertainment, News Askew. Television Without Pity, Defamer Books: eReader features, eReader new books, FictionWise new books, Amazon Science Fiction, Project Gutenberg new books, Powell's Books Daily Dose Comics: New releases, Comic Alert, Comic Book Resources, Dilbert, Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes, PVP Online Humor: Dave Barry's Blog, Fark.com, The Onion, Daily Show headlines Movies: Comics2Film, IMDb News, DVD News and Features News: Yahoo! Top stories, assorted AP feeds, Snopes Opinion: Molly Ivins, Mark Morford Politics: Media notes, NYT Opinion, Wonkette, WP Editorials Tech: Boing Boing, Slashdot, Gizmodo, Wired News, Writing on Your Palm Writers: Making Light, Mark Evanier, Neil Gaiman, Peter David
and I add and drop feeds regularly. I've got my own, from my LJ page, but it seems to only work intermittantly.
So which great ones am I missing?
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I’ve tried to add some but it seems like a bunch don’t work so well. Seems to be still new and developing.
Posts: 2845 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I thought this was going to be a thread of clever interpretations of the acronym RSS. You know...like Read Silly Stories.
Posts: 512 | Registered: Jun 2002
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posted
mph: RSS (and there's some minor disagreement as to what RSS stands for) is a simple, web-based syndication format, which a news reader (maybe a program, maybe a website -- there's a very popular news reader called bloglines), subscribed to an RSS feed (well, many RSS feeds), regularly pulls down (every hour or two, say, in the case of a news reader program).
Two essential parts of RSS are that it is simple, and that it is item based. Most RSS feeds consist of a series of items with titles, descriptions, and links (to the full version of the item on the web, or something the article references), and little more. This is important because it is thus very easy to skim and consume RSS items (and also very easy to render them programmatically, which has contributed greatly to their spread).
Furthermore, because it is item based, your news reader can tell the difference between new items and old items. So you don't bother looking at a bunch of old items, or at feeds with no new items, et cetera (partly it depends on how you choose to view your items -- you might look at a feed at a time, or just have your news reader show you all the new items on all the feeds).
I usually have my news reader show me all the new items on all the feeds, then I quickly go down the list and discard (metaphors for interacting with items varies by news reader) the ones I'm not interested in and read the ones I'm interested in, based on the title and the source. I can finish a few hundred items from dozens of websites in a couple of minutes, easily, as I don't read most of them, and then spend a couple of minutes more reading the links of interest I opened in the background in a web browser.
This makes RSS indispensable for dealing with high volumes of information.
Another useful aspect of RSS is that it is effectively a publish-subscribe mechanism. If you have a website that publishes something new only rarely, you don't want to visit it every day, you want to only visit when something is new. RSS enables that. Because a news reader checks regularly (but you don't have to be aware of it) and has indicators for which feeds have unread/new items, you're immediately aware which sites have new things. This makes it great for monitoring, say, software projects. Indeed, one of the big uses of RSS is internal communication -- if everyone in a programming division publishes an RSS feed with quick notes on what they're working on/what they've finished/what they're having problems with, and everyone subscribes to all the feeds, collaboration is much improved. Further, if formats are agreed upon for certain statements its extremely easy to add programmatic functionality -- for instance, whenever a new target build stage is chosen, you might publish an RSS item with [BUILD version date] in the title, and each person's customized news reader might add when that build should be done to their calendar software.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
"My Yahoo" has an RSS reader that you can use on your own page. I think it's the local newspapers fault that their links don't work right. Tried to get them to fix it, but they don't seem to know much. A couple of others I've added just never have updates. Again, their fault too. I like the idea, I guess it just seems that some of these places that try it don't set it up right.
Posts: 2845 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Jay - you might try some of them again, later. I've gone to add RSS feeds and received error messages at one time, and then had them work later on. No clue why, but it happens.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I use Bloglines. I used to use a desktop reader -- it had some nice functions, but it was slow and didn't work with 'atom' feeds (Blogger uses atom).
All of my feeds are either Mormon or pr/marketing related. But thanks to Chris, I may be adding some speculative fiction-related ones soon.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Some of those are dormant, and others are on a friends filter I don't check often. Eventually I'll probably play around with a real RSS aggregator, but for right now I'm happy that LiveJournal lets you add RSS feeds as friends. It's convenient to read the feeds on my Friends page.
I think my favorite is probably my Netflix feed. If an update appears, then that means they've just received some DVDs from me and are ready to ship the next one. Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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Hey Chris, where did you find an IMDb feed? I've been looking around on the site for one but have so far had no luck.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
It was a scraped feed -- another site grabbing headlines from IMDb and maing their own RSS feed -- but it's returned errors for the last week so I killed it.
posted
Pluck, which seems to handle everything else just fine. Wondering if it's because I've been to my page entries so it never thinks I have anything new to see...
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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