Coming of Age: An introduction to the new worldwide web

By John Evans

Introduction
If you’ve never heard of the term RSS or RSS feeds you are not alone. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project , 26% of the average American internet users have never heard of the term and a further 64% aren’t really sure what it means. In this article I will give the reader a brief overview of RSS and its application for busy educators.

So what is RSS? RSS is an acronym that stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication depending on who is describing it. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML) file formats for Web syndication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication) used
by (amongst other things) news websites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website) and web logs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog)…The technology behind RSS allows internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly.” The vast amount of information on the internet coupled with its accessibility for any user can be overwhelming. Now this is the exciting part…instead of being
overwhelmed and overloaded, RSS allows the user to be in control of the information coming to them. They can set up their own collection of incoming information feeds of their choice and sift through it with less difficulty and far less time than ever before.

Web logs (blogs) and news sites are the most common use of RSS feeds. When new content is added to a blog or web site, that content is automatically updated to every subscriber of that RSS feed. A software program called an aggregator automatically pulls in the feeds. The aggregator program can be desktop-based residing on one computer, or web-based allowing access from
multiple computers. Most aggregator programs are free and can be easily obtained on the internet. Some web browsers now have a newsreader feature built in and the feature is promised for newer operating systems coming in the near future such as Microsoft’s upcoming Windows update. Popular sites such as My MSN, My Yahoo! and My AOL each have built-in RSS readers. All that is required by the individual once they have decided on their feed aggregator of choice is a few minutes of setup and then subscribing to the feeds that interest them.

Setting up a news aggregator is relatively easy. My preference is Bloglines at www.bloglines.com. I like it because it is free and it is web-based, meaning I can access it from any computer connected to the web.

There are many guides on the internet to take you through the set-up procedure but the one I prefer is “RSS: a Quick Start Guide for Educators” at Will
www.weblogged.com). This will take you Richardson’s Weblogg-Ed blog (through setting up a Bloglines account and has plentiful tips for using it in education. A more extensive explanation of RSS Feeds can be found at the Contentious blog written by Amy Gahran, a self-described content strategist, in her 12 part series entitled “What are Web Feeds (RSS) and Why Should You Care?”

So why would this be of this interest to you? Well, if you are using the internet as a source of information, and visit sites on a regular basis, sifting through the material you like to read can eat up a lot of the time in your day. With RSS feeds set up in your aggregator, you’d only have to go to one location to read all of the news content on all of those sites. As Will Richardson, teacher and self proclaimed blog evangelist and RSS advocate explains in his Quick Start Guide, “when you’re ready, you open the aggregator to read the individual stories, file them for later use, click through to the site itself, or delete them if they’re not relevant. In other words, you check one site instead of 30… not a bad trade-off for a typically busy teacher” . For busy educators, any tool that can save them some of their valuable time is a welcome resource.

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