Small business owners—well all of us—need to save time. Especially if you (wish to) follow blogs or other frequently updated sites online. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a little understood time-saver. Many of us associate RSS as a complex “Web 2.0 term” if at all. My friends say, …yeah I’ve heard of RSS…”
Though recent surveys indicate that executives are catching on to its use.
RSS and a Feed Reader help me read dozens of blogs and other frequently updated web sites without ever opening my web browser, Internet Explorer. I can read/scan the blogs very rapidly. When I open my ‘mini-web browser’, or news reader, it displays the most recent articles posted on the blogs/news sites I follow.
Michael Ermitage, Senior Web Editor of Plant Services Magazine, has published a thorough article at PlantServices.com about RSS. How to ease into using RSS is well worth a read. His explanation is comprehensive Here is Michael’s article.
Michael says, in part,
“RSS feeds simply are syndicated content continuously streamed for consumption. A subscriber to the PlantServices.com RSS feed, for example, will have access to a continuous stream of Plant Services content as it’s uploaded to the website. The beauty of the feed is that you don’t have to visit the website, sift through the many organizational categories, etc., to view the latest material. Instead, you can access your RSS reader or visit the web portal that contains your RSS subscriptions and sift through the list of stories. Many websites offer RSS feeds across a variety of subject areas, allowing you to select topics of highest interest.”
Michael’s article also refers to using ‘web portals’ to set up a way to view your RSS feeds using Google or Yahoo personal pages (instead of a news reader like Feed Demon).
I find RSS feeds are vastly speedier than clicking on each ‘bookmark’ on Internet Explorer. My feed reader is FeedDemon. I purchased it for $29.95 and it works like a charm.
Are any of you finding it difficult to explain how RSS feeds save time?
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