The Internet is, first and foremost, a place to find information. Legions of Web sites are teeming with information that is no more than a few keystrokes away from any browser in the world. That being said, finding new information can often be a taxing pastime.
Because of the nature of information Web sites, it can be beneficial to check them many times throughout the day. For example, the New York Times updates its site constantly, so new headlines are undoubtedly available every time the page is accessed. An innovation that has gained more and more popularity over the past year is RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication.
An RSS feed is a document that contains the most basic text from the actual Web site, meant to display only the content from the page it represents. The most useful RSS feeds are offered by news sites. The New York Times' Web site, for example, has more than 30 feeds for its many sections. Bloggers have also taken advantage of the technology.
In order to use RSS feeds, you'll need a feed reader, sometimes called an agregator. There are many desktop programs available, such as NetNewsWire, and a few online agregators, such as My Yahoo!. Mozilla's Firefox browser also supports RSS feeds. A feed reader allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed. When you subscribe to an RSS feed (some feeds are called Atom feeds, but it's really the same thing), you are presented with the recent updates to the parent Web site, listed in chronological order with the latest post at the top, sort of like an e-mail inbox. When the site posts something new, the feed is generally updated right away, and you can decide whether the article is worth reading.
Another perfect example of the usefulness of RSS feeds is the UComics Web site, which I used to visit every day to read Get Fuzzy, Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbes. The UComics site is quite possibly the slowest, most hideous and difficult to navigate Web site on the Internet. Unfortunately, the site doesn't provide RSS feeds of its own. One attentive blogger, however, has written an RSS feed that simply displays the images of the comics from the UComics Web site. Every day, you can get the latest comic without the bombardment of ads and redundant user interface elements. Not every comic is represented by the RSS feeds provided by the blogger, but he has a pretty good list, which can be found at www.dwlt.net/tapestry.
In this fast-paced information age, any technology that can help readers gather and absorb information faster will undoubtedly lead to a better-informed public. Also, the option to see content from oft-visited Web sites without all of the advertisement will probably appeal to even the most basic Internet user.
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