Thursday, August 23, 2007 Ng: Life made easier by RSS By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
ONE of the things you probably would have heard by now are wikis and blogs. These technologies, including social networking sites like YouTube or MySpace (or in the case of the Philippines, Friendster), are currently the rage nowadays.
Blogs are websites which are owned by an individual or a group where they share their thoughts, feelings, observations or interests. Various estimates have it that there are tens of millions of blogs all around the world.
Wikis is another technology which is most exemplified by Wiki-Pedia, which is a collective encyclopedia edited by everybody and is now almost the de facto standard reference site. It was one of the technologies that toppled the encyclopedia publishing business. WikiPedia is now much bigger and more successful than encyclopedia like Britannica or New World.
RSS and blogs are now almost standard tools that many corporations, including the big ones, use to communicate with their staff and customers.
Many chief executive officers (CEOs) and business leaders have also taken to blogging to boost their public communication and persona. People with blogs that are widely read are widely perceived to be thought leaders.
I have been blogging well over two years in my site www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife. One of the main underpinning technology of blogs (and also of most websites nowadays) is a technology called RSS (really simple syndication). If you go to websites, you normally will see somewhere on the site a small orange logo labeled XML or RSS. That is the link to RSS.
It is hard to describe how to use it, but if you get that link and input it to your latest browser (or feedreader, as they call it) or even to the latest copy of Outlook 2007, you will get whatever updates there are in a particular website in your email or feed. This enables you to read about it in your desktop, even if you are offline! This is similar to the way you use Outlook Express/Outlook to pull your mail to your computer and read/reply to it at your leisure.
Millions of people now (including me), subscribe to RSS and our lives are made much easier by it. Before, I use to go to six to 10 websites every day to read the news. You can imagine how much time it takes to click links as well as download stories.
With RSS, I maintain a subscription of about 100 blogs and news sites, and it is all downloaded into my desktop computer and I can read it at leisure. So I can scan and probably read five to 10 times more news at the same amount of time. Now, I am able to read or scan through hundreds of articles every day, and I don’t have to log into the website unless I find something interesting.
Websites like MSN or Yahoo have added the ability to use RSS in their sites.
When I talked about it to many people, they seemed daunted. More news to read! As if keeping up with all the local and national papers, and listening to the TV/radio news is not enough.
But if you are interested, I just got a newsreader that allows me to choose and tag whatever I find interesting. This has enabled me to pick interesting business and technology news which I share with you in my blog.
Incidentally, my blog is read by about 200 people online and 380 offline.
You can check out selected technical articles at http://www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife/writings/tech/ and selected business articles and blog readings at ttp://www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife/writings/biz/. I normally select about 10 to 20 a day news stories out of hundreds I read, so I hope it will save you time especially if your business and technical interests are the same as mine!
