Yes. It's true. I am a news junkie. But I'm not the only one out there. There are others - you know who you are. Our condition has taken countless hours away from other more productive things that we could be doing. However, there IS an answer. I can help.
The answer is Really Simple Syndication (or RSS). Frankly, it's the bomb. It allows me to collect the information I want from the websites that I want. How cool is it? Let us count the ways...
- RSS does not require any authentication or indentification to work. Your provider (newspaper, news site, magazine, etc) may require authentication to retrieve the RSS and/or the end information, but RSS does not require it (although it supports it). That means, unlike subscribing to email lists, etc, you don't have to give out any information (ie email addresses, which leads to more spam) to get their news. Yay!
- RSS is (basically) standardized. Yes, RSS is VERY new, but I've been using RSS services for well over a year now and I'm totally hooked. Most of the applications related to RSS know it's new and are very flexible in accepting the handful of standards that are out there. It'll clean up, but at least it's not random like what you might get on a website.
- RSS is text only. To me, that means no pop-ups, -unders, or ads. Just the facts (ma'am). I love it. Of course, as ad revenue goes down so goes the viability of most sites.
- Finally, and in my opinion, most important, RSS is centralized. I can read more news in my RSS reader (NewsGator for Outlook and Online) than I could possibly read surfing to each site and poking around for their latest morsels of info.
So, what does this technology buy you in the end? Well, it takes data/news/info from cooperating sites (such as Ketteman.com) and presents the page to you in a reader (such as the aforementioned NewsGator).
Sure, you can do the exact same thing by surfing around, but when you're still looking at websites, I'm off being productive...playing my XBox! :)
Here's a freebie...in addition to sites like Yahoo!, ESPN and Ketteman.com, check out RSSWeather.com.
Later.