Sunday, February 29, 2004
By MIKE LANGBERG
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
So you're one of those people living in the "blogosphere," the Internet realm where people communicate through Web logs. These online diaries are suddenly popular with everyone from teenagers to politicians, and it can be a huge struggle to keep track of the 10 or 20 or 50 blogs on your list of favorites.
The answer is something called RSS, a technology just now emerging from the narrow confines of techie-dom to become easy enough for nonexperts. There's a debate about what RSS stands for. "Really Simple Syndication" is a popular definition. Some campaign for "Rich Site Summary." The best name for now could be "Ready to Shift into Seriousness."
It's hard to adequately describe RSS in a single sentence, but I'll try: Using a program called an RSS reader, you sign up to receive automatic updates from blogs and other Web sites that distribute summaries of their latest postings.
The result is somewhat similar to requesting an e-mail newsletter, by which the newsletter's creator sends a message to everyone on the list whenever there's something new to tell the group. But managing the list, with the need to track "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests, is both complicated and expensive.
RSS, in contrast, is controlled by the recipient.
How it works
First, the blog's creator uses some simple software to make an RSS "feed" with summaries of new items.
Then the recipient "subscribes" to receive the feed through an RSS reader, also known as an RSS aggregator. The reader checks periodically, usually once every hour, for new feeds and displays any items it finds. If you want to know more about a particular item, there's usually a link to click that takes you directly to the Web page with the full text.
This isn't a huge time-saver if you're following only one or two blogs. But the benefit is immediate if you're trying to keep up with a large number -- especially if those blogs may be updated only every few days. Instead of repeatedly clicking through a long list of favorites or bookmarks in your browser, trying to remember what you've already seen and what's new, the RSS reader does the hard work for you and pulls down only fresh items.
Latest programs
Among the new generation of software and services that shield the underlying complexity of RSS are two new products from NewsGator Technologies of Denver (www.newsgator.com), both introduced in mid-January.
NewsGator 2.0 is an RSS reader that sells for $29 and installs itself within Microsoft Outlook. RSS feeds become folders inside the Inbox, and items become individual messages. There's a convenient wizard for finding and subscribing to RSS feeds, and users can work with items in the same way as regular e-mail -- forwarding them to other people, for example, or moving them to different folders.
NewsGator Online Services is an online RSS aggregator that costs $5.95 a month. Not only does the service track RSS feeds through a password-protected browser page, but users can download items using e-mail programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora. There's also access to what NewsGator calls "premium content," a small selection of exclusive RSS feeds that could grow bigger as media companies look for new ways to make money online.
Both products are well-designed and, with a few exceptions, show a degree of professional polish missing from many first-generation efforts.
Not that NewsGator is alone in making improvements, or is even the best choice for all users. For one thing, you need Outlook -- not Outlook Express -- to use NewsGator 2.0.
Additional options
There are lots of RSS readers available today, more than I can list here. Some are free; others offer a free trial period and then require a payment, usually in the range of $20 to $40.
Among the best-known RSS readers for Windows are AmphetaDesk (www.disobey.com/amphetadesk), FeedDemon (www.bradsoft.com/ feeddemon), NewsDesk (www.wildgrape.net) and NewsGator. For the Macintosh, there's AmphetaDesk and NetNewsWire (http://ranchero. com/netnewswire/).
There are also readers that work through the Web, displaying results in a browser rather than installing any software on your computer. In addition to NewsGator Online Services, these include the free Bloglines service (www.bloglines.com) and an RSS reader built into the online e-mail service offered by Oddpost (www.oddpost.com).
Test drive
I set up RSS feeds using both NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services in just a few minutes, with a minimum of hassle. I subscribed to my colleague Dan Gillmor's eJournal, CNet's News.com, headlines from The New York Times and updates from a technology gadget site called Gizmodo.
Every few hours, checking either in Outlook or the NewsGator Online Services page, I could see how many new postings had arrived from Dan, get technology news from CNet and Gizmodo, and keep an eye on world developments from The Times.
If I get tired of any particular feed, I can just hit the "unsubscribe" button. If I want to find more feeds, there are several RSS search engines to explore, such as Syndic8 (www.syndic8.com).
I also tried Bloglines, which is even easier to use, and although it offers fewer features than NewsGator, it still does an excellent job of covering the basics.
If you want to stick your toe in the RSS water, I'd recommend starting with Bloglines, because it's free and there's no software to install on your computer.
Of course, RSS isn't for everyone. The blogosphere requires a high level of tolerance for unfiltered and quirky discourse.
But I'm betting RSS will continue to grow. Soon everyone from your employer to your softball team to your child's school could offer an RSS feed, making RSS readers as common as e-mail software is today.