How to feed your mind

If you read most of your daily news through RSS feed readers or aggregators, skip this article and do something else.

The reason I’m writing about RSS feeds is because of how great I personally think this way of staying in the loop is. If you think that reading newspapers is the best way to get news, think again, you should bear in mind that newspapers provide readers with news that arrives a day late or, at best, a couple of hours late, so it’s outdated news by the time you read it.

In the US, some magazine publications have drastically reduced copy sizes, eliminating news sections, simply because their readers know the news before the publication hits newsstands. Now, most of the publications give their own opinion and opinion on those news articles instead of publishing the headlines, simply because it is a waste of ink, paper and time.

I’ve been using feed aggregators for years, and people tend to be surprised how up-to-date I am when it comes to the latest news, it would surprise anyone when I started talking about the latest tech news a day or two later. They call me saying, “You’re right, I just read this in the newspaper.”

You will see that humanity is moving forward in so many ways, ways that we didn’t even dream of, like blogging and the way it has evolved, or listening to podcasts, and how fun and informative they have become. But I’ll address both in a later article, now let’s focus on RSS.

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndicate, well that’s one definition, it has many meanings, but it’s just information that comes to you when you subscribe, but what makes RSS unique? And how is it different from ezines or email newsletters?

Ezines and newsletters are delivered to your email account and to be honest we tend to ignore them sometimes, because they are too long to read, we would waste hours going through heaps of information so we tend to pile them up in our tray. input, until we got fed up with the presence of the inbox and decided to read them over the weekend, now this is outdated, no one does that anymore, or at least it shouldn’t do it anymore, you see that technology has advanced a lot, and now getting informed is easier and much more fun.

Enter RSS or news feeds, the main difference is the fact that instead of reading news from your email inbox, or typing a URL and going to a news website, you receive the news in your software aggregator feed capture, once you subscribe to a feed the site will send the latest news to your aggregator software, you can select the length of the news feed, so that you can read a summary of the news, instead of having to Read it all, time is money, and this is especially true these days.

Let’s say you subscribed to a news site, you turn on your aggregator, it will grab all the latest unread feeds on that news site, after reviewing them, the aggregator will delete them and update them to update your feeds with new news.

Don’t waste your time, and you got what you wanted thanks to XML technology, what can be better than that, well, aggregators come in different types and forms, there are free ones all over the net, and of course there are paid subscriptions. , but to round them off, aggregators are classified into four main types.

Online aggregators:

Thanks to the advancement of what is known as Web 2.0, you get online software like Gmail, Flickr, Digg, the new Yahoo home page or even an online aggregator, most of these aggregators are free to subscribe, they work in a efficient, my personal favorites are Bloglines and Newsgator.

Aggregator notifiers:

These are simple little softwares that you download to your machine, they will notify you with a pop-up with any news that comes to your subscription, you can download them after joining an online aggregator and they will sync with the aggregator’s server to check for new sources.

Built-in browser aggregators:

You can find them in free browsers like Apple’s Safari 2.0, which comes with Mac OS X Tiger, you can also find it in Firefox, on all major operating system platforms, and you can also find it in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0 (you can download IE 7 Beta 3 for now).

Aggregator software:

These are designated software where your only job is to get news for you, there are plenty of those, but the best would be NetNewsWire for the Mac platform and FeedDemon on Windows, but to use either of these you have to pay an Annual Subscription.

What to do next:

Now you must go to one of the available aggregators and subscribe to one of them, after doing this step you must choose the news feeds you want to subscribe to and choose them, that’s all. Simple, easy and sufficient.

I recommend that you try a free online subscription to see how useful this technology is before paying for an annual subscription and downloading an RSS reader.

Stay informed 24/7 and enjoy!