Syndicate
Geeks have a secret, and they haven’t been spreading the word very well.
Visiting websites is so 2005!
Think about how you use the web right now. Let’s say you like to follow a few blogs and you like to keep up on new movies at Rotten Tomatoes. You read your news from CBC.ca, and you watch the hockey headlines at NHL.com.
If you’re typical, you visit your sites daily. If you’re bored, you visit Hourly. Compulsive? You scour the site for the last thing you read, and then read everything after that. If you’re busy, you forget to check for a while. If you’re busy AND compulsive, you have a problem!
What if you’re smart? What would you do?
Some smart people thought about that, and came up with a solution - Syndication. Why waste time going from site to site? Take everything you care about, syndicate it into a single stream, and just check that. Enter RSS.
RSS stands for a few things, so just call it Really Simple Syndication. Have you ever seen this icon? 
It’s a link to an RSS Feed. RSS lets you see what’s new on a website, without actually going to the site.
When you add all of your favorite sites to an RSS reader (like Google Reader), you create a single stream of everything you care about. I think Google Reader is the best, and all of us at SE have been using it for a while. It acts like email, so every blog post, news article, or flickr photo shows up as a new ‘message’.
Just like your email, you can organize items & feeds into folders, tags, and stars. Google Reader remembers what you’ve read and what you haven’t, so to keep up with everything you care about, you just fire up reader, and go!
Google Reader (or aggregation, in general) is revolutionary. It’s one of those things that won’t make sense until you use it. So trust me, and give it a try for a week. The more you use it, the more useful it gets, and once you start surfing this way you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
Here are some tips to get you started:
- - When you set up your account, add some of Google’s recommended sites.
- - Look for RSS links (and icons) everywhere! Don’t be afraid of adding lots of feeds.
- - Drop the compulsion to read absolutely everything. 90% of what’s out there is uninteresting to you.
- - Scan headlines, and read what you’re interested in. I read < 10% of what comes in.
- - Use the shortcut keys
- - Share what you like!
Good luck!
4 Comments so far
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It’s interesting to note that even SE has a feed:
http://www.stupideverything.ca/?feed=rss2
You would be hard-pressed to find a site that didn’t have a feed.
Happy reading!
Comment by Brent 04.23.08 @ 9:59 amWhat a fantastic post - syndication is certainly a part of the net that just isn’t explained well enough. Not only in how to use the tools, but in how it changes the way you interact with the net.
Jeff showed me this world a long time ago, and it really has changed my whole interaction with the Internet. Okay, well, except for google-ing. That’s still the fastest way to get answers to how to do things.
I find that as I’m flying around the net researching things, I’ll run into sites containing opinions or information I am interested in. I’ll subscribe to their RSS feed and read as much as I want about the topic until I’m overwhelmed or dis-interested, and then I’ll remove them. This has completely changed the way I learn about things. It’s a bit more passive. If I need a quick answer, google is still the best way to go, but now I can get a steady stream of information about topics I didn’t know about to read through, without having to browse around. That’s very handy.
I also find that after awhile, you start to hit some good blogs that you probably otherwise wouldn’t have found. In this way, you start to get a feel for some of the experts in fields you care about.
All of a sudden, the net isn’t annoying. I’ve got all the data I can really pay attention to, all in one spot. I don’t have to worry about managing bookmarks, or remembering URLs, or really typing in general.
The only word of caution - as you subscribe to noisy sites (lifehacker, digg, freshmeat, etc), you’ll run into situations where you have hundreds, if not thousands of unread posts. As Jeff mentions - you just have to be okay with missing that information! I spent the first few days trying to read absolutely everything that came into my reader. It’s just not possible. Skim, and be merry.
Comment by Brett 04.23.08 @ 11:42 pmMcCain and Obama use Google Reader?
http://www.google.com/googlereader/powerreaders/index.html
Comment by Jeff 08.18.08 @ 11:49 amLeave a comment
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