NY Times Expounds on RSS

You know things are rumbling when the edge technologies get folded inward and migrate towards the core. Yet another sign of the growing presence of RSS and those "little orange icons" has been release, this time by The New York Times.

In a recent article, they extol the virtues:

Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings.

[...]

R.S.S. may become an invaluable Web tool, but at the moment there are still a few kinks to work out. To add R.S.S. channels, for example, you have to look at Web sites for orange buttons labeled R.S.S. or XML. After you click on the button, you usually have to cut and paste the address of the feed into the reader software. Some reader programs can grab some feeds automatically, but it's hit or miss. Furthermore, finding new R.S.S. sources takes time.

The best approach is to visit special sites that list R.S.S. syndicators. The largest ones include Synidic8.com (www.syndic8.com), which has an extensive listing of R.S.S. blogs; Newsisfree (www.newsisfree.com), which also creates its own R.S.S. feeds from various sites; and Moreover (www .moreover.com), an R.S.S. company that has created scores of business-oriented channels.

As more sites adopt R.S.S., there is the potential for a new kind of information overload. Subscribe to enough R.S.S. feeds and you'll quickly find yourself consuming hours reading all the headlines and summaries. On the other hand, a tool is only as good as its owner's judgment. So if you can control yourself, you may find that R.S.S. is the best tool yet for taming the Web.

Source: NYTimes.com, "Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information"