Jul 23, 2005 - 23:40:37 CDT
You may want to become acquainted with the RSS feed.It will affect how you use the Internet, if it hasn't done so already.
It is changing the way people get news and information.
It is making "The Old Media Trinity" (print, radio, television) feel uncomfortable, threatened.
It is a key part of "The New Media Trinity" (podcasts, blogs, RSS feeds).
The New Media Trinity represents an online content delivery system that is beginning to challenge the Old Media Trinity in terms of news audience and authority. Research shows at least 67 percent of Americans, or roughly 135 million people, are turning to the Internet for current news, sports, weather and other information.
Given the dramatic growth of podcasting and blogging, those numbers will, no doubt, increase even more.
And at the expense of the Old Media.
This online shift is driven primarily by the RSS feed.
In technical terms, RSS Version 2.0 ("Really Simple Syndication") is a subset of the Extensible Markup Language, or "XML," and is used for Web syndication by news Web sites, weblogs and podcasts.
Simply put, an RSS feed is the "digital glue" that binds online content to a standard way of automatically delivering text, audio and video to you.
Sites that offer RSS feeds usually provide you with a bit of code that you paste into a Web page. That code pulls information from the site such as news headlines, blog summaries, audio and video feeds.
In this way, you can literally customize a Web page for yourself that always features the latest news and information pulled from the Internet on topics of interest to you.
Instead of you going out and searching the Internet for information, the information comes to you, 24-7.
News Web sites such as Fox News (www.foxnews.com), CNN (cnn.com), the New York Times (www.nytimes.com) and others are offering continuously updated news headlines that you can check on a moment's notice. Breaking news is just a click away. In most cases, it's as fast -- if not faster -- than print, television and radio.
RSS feeds mark a subtle but significant change for the Internet. The online world is moving from a static resource to an active information service. The benefit of this for the end user is "information on demand" and content delivered according to your schedule.
And RSS isn't just for news. There are shopping RSS feeds, job and employment feeds, video gaming information, daily comic strips, news photos and videos, software downloads, product reviews, quotes of the day, blogs, podcasts and more.
In fact, there are at least 25,000 RSS feeds available to choose from covering just about any interest you may have.
How do you find an RSS feed? You use an RSS directory -- essentially, a Web site search engine that indexes available RSS feeds worldwide.
How to you see and read an RSS feed? You use an RSS Reader, or "Aggregator," a program that makes the process of collecting and displaying RSS feeds on your computer a relatively easy task.
To learn more about the basics of RSS feeds, visit the RSS Tutorial Web site (www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial) or the RSS Basics Page (rss.softwaregarden.com/aboutrss.html).
To find RSS feeds, try CNET RSS Feeds Directory (www.cnet.com/4520-6022-5115113.html), Syndic8 (www.syndic8.com), RSS Network (www.rss-network.com), RSSFeeds.com (www.rssfeeds.com), Search4RSS (www.search4rss.com/index.php) or RSS Locator (www.rss-locator.com).
To find and download RSS news readers/aggregators, try Readers (blogspace.com/rss/readers), RSS Aggregators (blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/directory/5/aggregators) or List of Aggregators (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators).
(Keith Darnay is the webmaster and designer for bismarcktribune.com. His Web site, featuring this column going back to 1995, is at http://www.darnay.com/iec.)
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