Thing Eight: RSS

Playing with bloglines reminded me of a period in the Web's history when someone first came up with this great idea called "Push," which meant that content would be sent to you instead of the user always "pulling" it in, or downloading. Corporate systems people hated the idea, because so many employees were subscribing to these streams that it choked the bandwidth for everyone. Now, it's commonplace and expected that everyone will have web feeds automatically sent to their computer.

Bloglines is easy to use, but I realized that I've been using RSS for quite some time without even thinking about it, as have many other Internet users. I use iGoogle as my home page and have customized it to subscribe to feeds from BBC News, Wired Magazine, NPR, the New York Times, and many others. You can do the same thing with PageFlakes, NetVibes, My Yahoo, and other sites. Here's a link that describes 14 of these personalized home page sites: http://mashable.com/2007/06/29/personalized-homepages/. The great thing about using these services is that not only is it easy to set up, it is just as easy to add and delete your choice of feeds and to design your page according to which information you want to see first. Every time I log on to the Web, I can quickly catch up with news that matters to me.