One-Stop Shopping

The very first mention of RSS in my eJournal and images was on the final day of 2003. My own personal use of this technology mirrors its underutilized potential. When first introduced, I was awed by the potential of pulling various syndicated feeds into a single location. It mirrored attempts with software such as AvantGO on PDAs and Pocket PCs years before. The concepts of push and pull network technologies always seem to be on the back-burner. Twitter is often used as a means to unify separate streams of information from a multitude of sources. Even more importantly, differing types of implementation are still being codified in HTML5.

RSS, however, is already mature and robust. The average Joe in an average browser might not notice a particular webpage hosts syndicated information coming in from different sources. Yet, it's all over the web. For example, most every news organization offers RSS feeds to a variety of their content. Even entries of this blog are available in this way:

http://dennissylvesterhurd.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Browsers offer ways to capture these streams as do many stand-alone programs or Net-apps such as Google Reader. In a nutshell, it is easier and takes a lot less time to subscribe to a list of resources than to have to individually visit each and every one of those websites. People with a wide variety of interests, or those news junkies among us, have the most to gain by learning about RSS.



I'm taking the time to discuss this today mainly because of my discovery of an Android App for my phone. I have tried several RSS readers but have now become rather partial to BuzzBox. It comes with a number of pre-arranged feeds which can be selected. Of course, it also offers the ability to search for others. I can now browse through the titles of news and articles from top sources and choose to open only the ones which are of interest to me.