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I am still in my post-election triple depression,
considering four more W. years, Scalia as our head
judge, and a conservative ocean's 11 (yes, eleven!) worth of states voting
against certain types of marriages. I told my in-house Republican that she
couldn't gloat, at least for the next few days.
To try to divert myself from thinking about this sad
state of affairs, at least I can turn to the Web and drown my sorrows in data
dumps, late-night blogs, and ludicrous analyses from
pundits large and small. And the number of gratifying election humor emails
that I have received also helps.
Be that as it may, one of the best ways these days
to stay on top of things is to use RSS, a syndication service that is basically
a messaging protocol between you and your favorite Web site. When someone adds
content to their server, the site can be configured to send out an RSS message
so that you can be notified of this new content. You can pick up these messages
in any number of products, called RSS readers, ranging from specialized
software tools, combination readers/email clients like
Mozilla's Thunderbird, to Web sites that can
aggregate the content such as My.Yahoo.com, NewsGator.com, and Bloglines.com.
For those of you that are old enough to remember,
this whole RSS thing sounds annoyingly and cloyingly like what was once called
push technology, which was the darling of the digerati back in 1996. Back then
we had special software that you could put on your PC and whenever some new
content came rolling along from your favorite sites, it would be
"pushed" to your PC and you could read it without having to
constantly check the sites and root around in your browser to see what was new
on that particular site. I had a brief relationship with various push products
and kept returning to email as the best notification mechanism for keeping you
updated.
However, email as a notification system is patently
flawed. For one thing, corporate filters tend to block many lists these days,
especially if you have certain words in them or in your subject lines. And
people change email addresses faster than anything, so staying on top of your
list is always a challenge. That's where RSS comes in handy.
RSS has none of these issues with email filters, at
least for now. And I have begun to use it during my day job to keep track of my
own sites. You see, we have a huge content repository here at the Electronics
Group at CMP. From that content we publish numerous sites, and having the RSS
feeds to those sites means I can easily check on my people and see what they
have posted for the day, as well as have a neat mechanism for my editors to
keep track of what other work they have done. And this is without the crude
fuss and bother of having to click around various sites. (My thanks to Stuart
Bowen and Rob Keane for making this happen, by the way.)
Now, I am not new to RSS at all. Indeed, I have been
using an RSS "feed" (as the individual "channels" are
called) on my own site for quite some time. And with absolutely no promotion,
links, or anything resembling a marketing plan, this feed gets quite a few
people who have subscribed. For those of you that are interested, here is the
address to enter into your reader:
Until this week I was preparing my feeds by hand,
using a text editor (I'll let you guess which editor I use), and then uploading
the file to my site every week. It is painful, yes. And when I tried to update
my RSS 0.9 feed manually to a more recent version, I ran into some problems, so
I backed off for the time being. Maybe one of you RSS gods can help me figure
this out. Then I came across FeedForAll.com, which seems like a nifty tool to
update your feeds, but I haven't spent much time with it yet. It does seem
simple and easy to set up your feeds, and I will write more about it later, as Iyou’re your reactions to the feed that I have assembled.
Another site worth checking out for various RSS
tools is here:
http://blogspace.com/rss/tools
Of course, there are more sophisticated ways to do
these feeds, including linking directly into your own content management system
so that the site itself prepares them and sends out the messages. Indeed, that
is how our feeds work at CMP, with a little help from our Web staff and a bit
of programming magic. And there are even tools that allow you to insert Amazon
affiliate ads inside your feeds (available at feedburner.com) among other
things, so this area is definitely poised to take off.
Since setting up my T-bird email reader for RSS, I
have begun to subscribe to a bunch of sites that I like to check up on,
including the competition. (Techtarget, bless them,
is still behind the times and doesn't have any feeds for their sites. Better
for us, I say.) I hesitate to say that RSS could become the push of this decade,
but in its own quiet way, it has. And maybe with a brighter
future, too. Let me know what you think of my feed, and what reader(s)
you have used and prefer.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
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