UPDATE: As an alternative to reading the whole post, here is a video that runs less than four minutes and does a good job of explaining RSS. You can then scan through the rest of my article to learn more.
The free tool that I use far more than any other is Google Reader. While there are many RSS readers available, Google Reader is free, has as simple interface like most Google products, and as most of us now have Google ID’s (for Gmail, Calendar, etc) we don’t have to sign up to yet another site to use it.
Firstly, what is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is the most popular format for syndicating web based content. This leads to the obvious question of …
…What is syndication?
It is a method for converting web based content into a standard format (which by itself is not very pretty as you can see if you follow this link to one of my feeds) that can be read by a large number of “feed readers”. These readers can either be a web site like Google Reader, integrated into the browser or email client, or even in other places like mobile phones.
The reason why syndication is so useful to you is that it allows you to access content in a way this is more flexible, and thus more convenient to you. Almost all blogs, news sites and most other websites that regularly publish new content will have a “feed” of that content which can then be read by any feed reader. If you’re only interested in following one website this doesn’t help much (unless, say, you want to follow it on your phone), however if you visit a number of sites this can save an enormous amount of time. How? You can use the reader to aggregate content from many sites into one place instead of having to visit each site individually – which is why feed readers are often known as “aggregators”.
How do I get started?
The best way to learn how to set up and use Google Reader is to watch the two minute video at the YouTube’s Google Reader Help Page. It really is very simple, I promise!
As you’ll see in the video, the first step is to head to Google Reader and sign in using your Google ID (if you’re not already signed in to use Gmail, etc). Then you can start adding feeds. You can do this three ways:
- Use the “add a subscription” button just below the Google Reader logo to search for feeds on your favorite sites or topics;
- Look for a link* to a feed on the site you want to follow, then copy the URL attached to that link and paste it into the “add a subscription” search box in Google Reader; or
- If you use Firefox, simply click on the link to a feed on the site you want to follow and follow the instructions. Other browsers will act differently so I won’t go into detail about using this method here.
* To find a link to an RSS feed, visit the site you want to follow and look around the site, or in your browsers address bar, for icons that look like 
or 
. These icons will be the links to the site’s feed. Many sites will have more than one feed – for example, The Age has feeds for its tops stories, sport, entertainment, world, small business, technology, etc.
Is that all Google Reader can do?
No, there’s lots more it can do such as allowing you to categories feeds and share, tag, email, and add notes to individual stories… however, I’ll leave you to discover all that for yourself.
Got any more tricks with RSS?
The ability to bring together content from a number of blogs onto one easy-to-read page is just the beginning. You can use RSS to gather all sorts of interesting content from the web. Here are some examples:
- To track news for any topic head to Google News and search for your chosen topic. The page showing the results of your search will have a feed that you can subscribe to. It’s just like having Google continually running that search for you and sending the results straight to your feed reader!
- If you want to track your topic across more than just news sites, create a Google Alert (as a “feed” using the drop down box) and subscribe to the feed it creates for you.
- To see what people are saying about any topic on Twitter you can do a search on Twitter Search and subscribe to the feed of the results.
This is just the beginning. Hopefully your next step is to get set up on Google Reader and subsribe to the feeds for my blog and myarticle list at Diigo.
Let me know how you go, and if you find any feeds worth following send me the link!
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