When you’re at work, staring at an excel spreadsheet, you should be focused on work. But we know the truth. Your fingers are typing, the mouse is moving, and the excel spreadsheet that you’ve been staring at for the past week is growing slowly. In the back of your mind, you’re wondering if gizmodo has posted any new content. You’re hoping that the cute girl you went out with last week has updated her blog (yes cute girls have blogs!) and if she mentions you in it.
You’re not allowed to surf the net at work (too much), so checking your favorite gadget weblog each hour just isn’t acceptable in today’s cut throat, slave driving corporate world. There’s ways around this problem, and those ways begin with the letters RSS. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the technology that we’ve all been waiting for. Imagine, everytime Rocketboom updates their vlog, you receive a notice –just as you would receive a notice when a new email arrives- and can view that new entry in your email client, or RSS reader.
I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client for my RSS reader. There are fancy readers, but I’m not a fancy guy. When surfing the web, and you see these (
) little buttons, this means the site is ready to be RSS’d by you. Some apps let you drag and drop, some require a copy paste, be either way it’s super duper easy to “subscribe” to your favorite blog, news site, podcast or, other online syndication.
So why is RSS so unpopular? 1% of the internet population uses RSS. The 12-21 male demographic is the leading RSS group at a whopping 5% of the polled use RSS. Is it because we like looking at every page in our bookmarks, each time we get a chance to hit the internet? Do people just not understand RSS? Is there a need for a LIVEdigitally how-to-RSS article in the near future? I’m baffled? I’ve been using RSS for some time, and tons of sites offer simple syndication, so what’s the hold up? Let’s get RSS off the bench and on the court!