Using RSS
If you’re a blogger and aren’t taking advantage of RSS feeds, I strongly urge you to consider doing so. Rather than surfing around from site to site to glean the latest news and information, you can selectively bring all that to you by subcribing to the RSS feeds using a piece of aggregation software. This sounds complicated, but it is actually so easy to do! Most blogs and news sites have a link or button that takes you to a specific URL that you copy and paste into your aggregator. That’s it. From there, all you have to do is check your aggregator each time you log on to the net and you can skim through all the latest postings without having to surf. If you subscribe to what you believe are quality sources of information - which are certain to point you toward other quality sources - you save tremendous amounts of time.
RSS feeds come from all kinds of different sources, not just weblogs and news sites, but also from commerical sources. Take John for example, who recently purchased a CD from iTunes. If he really likes the service and plans to order more CDs in the future, he could subcribe to the iTunes RSS feeds (link via Scripting News) for the musical genres of his liking. That way, news of the latest releases or upcoming exclusives would come to him on a daily basis, rather than he having to go and check the site once a week or so. Once you subscribe to a feed, you can forget about it. You don’t have to remember to check a site, it comes to you. Having to remember one less thing to do is valuable in our busy lives.
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