I guess it is pretty much obvious by now that I like RSS a lot. Actually, some of you can go as far as say that I am absolutely crazy about it. And they won’t be too far from the truth you know…
I knew about RSS for some time now and was following the subject once in a while. But it was BlogLines.com that really opened my eyes. It has been only about a week since I have started to use the service, but it seems like ages. I already find it hard to believe that I could live without RSS. Just in this one week the number of sites that I can visit daily increased from 10 to 50. And I am using less time.
Before, I used to get annoyed if sites that I am visiting daily were not updated for days. I felt like I was losing a lot of time visiting it every day while nothing was changing. Now I don’t care how often the site updates. As soon as it does, I will know alsmost instantly. This does save a whole lot of time. Now I can visit more sites because I will be coming only when they update. On the other hand, I do get annoyed now if the site does not provide a feed.
And it is not only new articles that I can get update notifications about, but comments too. I started to comment on other people’s blogs not being afraid of forgetting the discussion. Most blog sites provide me with feeds to discussions that I participate in.
Yet another great feature of using RSS is that I can get the pure information now without being slowed down by a stupid web design or browser incompatibility. The majority of sites provide full articles/posts in RSS feeds. That means that I can configure my RSS aggrigator to look the way I want it to and it will show me the posts from all over the Internet the way I want to see them.
Does that seem like a lot to you? If not I can throw more. Take for example, search engines that index RSS feeds. These babies give out information that is minutes old in their search results, not days or months like all the others.
…and there is plenty more.
If I got you interested, check out these two articles: Three ways RSS can make your Web life better and “Using RSS to increase relevance and maximize freshness“. These should broaden your horizons.