There are at least three ways to be competitive in business: be more productive, be better informed, and be more innovative. Using two new Internet technologies known as newsreaders (or news aggregators) and RSS, you can become both more productive and better informed. Two out of three isn’t bad and if you stick with us we may even be able to help you become more innovative.

Understanding both RSS—which stands for Really Simply Syndication—and newsreaders requires taking a trip back into Internet history to a time about ten years ago when an application called PointCast took the Web by storm—for a while. PointCast enabled its users to subscribe to specific sources of business information published by various news sources and to have that information constantly pushed to them. You can think of it as a persistent search or a saved search. People loved having business and technology news and information continually delivered right to their desktop. It was a great way to track a company or keep up with a new technology.

However, there were at least a couple of problems with PointCast:

Today, RSS and newsreaders are the new PointCast. Using a newsreader application—either running on your desktop or inside your browser—you can now subscribe to thousands and thousands of what are called feeds or news feeds—updates to websites and blogs. So, for example, instead of having to subscribe to The New York Times in order to read the business and technology news, you can simply navigate to the paper’s feeds page, http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml
/rss/index.html, and choose which topics you would like to subscribe to, such as Media & Advertising, World Business, Your Money, or Technology. Once these topics or news feeds are entered into your newsreader, every time a pertinent new item is published it will appear in your newsreader. So, not only can you read any news item from the Times for free, it is delivered automatically to your newsreader—rain or shine!

Without delving too far into the technicalities, RSS is an open web standard based on XML. It enables websites to create feeds of news and information on any topic they like. The feed represents new information on that topic entered into the site.

In addition to the full article from the website, headlines and excerpts are available in your newsreader—enabling you to very efficiently scan for what interests you and what is relevant to you. You can save a lot of time by perusing headlines and excerpts and avoiding reading articles that don’t meet your needs.

Of course, like most things in life, there is no free lunch, and despite those who think information should be free, there is a bit of upfront investment you need to make to take advantage of feeds from the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Forbes, Fortune, Rolling Stone, and thousands of other publications and websites, including virtually every blog extant. You won’t need to make a cash investment, because virtually every RSS feed is free as is almost every newsreader. But you will have to invest time to choose and install your newsreader and set up your feeds. (Many newsreaders come with a default set of useful business and technology feeds ready to go.) But once set up, this investment will pay off each day, every day.

Think of this time investment like choosing and configuring your web browser. You may have initially found the choice of browsers—Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape, and others—confusing and the setup process unfamiliar—how do you change the home page anyway? But, if you are reading this article, odds are you have long since gotten a multifold payback on the investment of time you made in initially setting up your browser. You’ll get just as big a payback for your time spent in setting up your newsreader, which you can think of as a browser for news feeds.

Just as there are desktop and web-based email clients, like Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail, there are desktop and Web-based newsreaders as well. NewsGator and Blogbridge for the PC and Shrook and NetNewsWire for the Macintosh are desktop applications that need to be downloaded, installed, and configured; web-based readers include Bloglines and FeedReader. There is also a web version of NewsGator. The advantage of a desktop application over a web-based application is usually speed and responsiveness. A desktop application may also have more features.

However, a web-based newsreader or aggregator lets you access your feeds from anywhere you can access the Internet. Ambidextrous newsreaders like NewsGator enable you to synchronize your feeds between your desktop application and your Web-based application. Newsreaders are either free, like Blogbridge or charge a nominal fee, like NewsGator or Shrook (about US$30).

With a desktop aggregator, you usually have to enter a feed from a site you want to monitor manually, usually by copying and pasting the URL of the feed into your application. With a web-based aggregator it may be as easy as clicking on a link.

One of the advantages of NewsGator is that it can be integrated directly into Microsoft Outlook, so you can read your news feeds just like reading your mail—although your feeds are stored in separate folders and not intermixed with your mail. The big advantage is that you don’t have to learn a new application or deal with upgrading it. Publishers of news aggregators tend to update their applications very frequently, too frequently for my taste.

As an example, here is a screen shot of the Blogbridge newsreader. Similar feeds are grouped into Guides in the far left column. The middle column lists the feeds in each Guide and the right-hand column shows headlines and articles from the currently selected MarketWatch.com blog, with the most recent articles shown first.

At this point you may be suffering from jargon overload: RSS, newsreaders, news aggregators, feeds, XML. The good news is that just as you quickly absorbed terms such as browser, home page, and URL once you had used Internet Explorer or Netscape for a while, you’ll pick up these new terms as you enjoy the advantages of your newsreader.

With a newsreader you can scan dozens of websites for new items of interest in a tenth of the time it would have taken you to browse to each site and search for what had changed since your last visit.

Make the investment to set up a newsreader—desktop or web-based—and load it with feeds. Virtually every website that provides feeds will inform you of that fact, just look for the symbol or for a link labeled “RSS,” which will usually take you to a page of feeds for the site. You’ll be more productive, because you can spend less time getting the information you need every day, and better informed, because you can scan more sites in less time than ever before.

If I’ve stimulated your interest, rest assured that there is a lot more to RSS and newsreaders than this brief introduction has provided. Some other items are: OPML and reading lists (basically packages of feeds on specific subjects), search engines for feeds, like Feedster and Technorati, and, going into the deep end of the tech pool, RSS-enabling your website, so folks with newsreaders can subscribe to your feeds! And of course, there is blogging; since RSS is built into every blogging platform, unlike standard web sites, blogging is intimately related to RSS and newsreaders.

At Tim Rosa Associates, we work with our clients to find effective ways to integrate RSS, newsreaders, blogging, and podcasts into their businesses. Our goals are to make busy professionals and their companies more productive, to enhance their corporate image, and to show them how to share their digital assets thereby attracting more customers and increasing revenue.

Founder and Manager
Tim Rosa Associates, LLC

Copyright © 2006 Tim Rosa Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.