The internet is growing at exponential rate. It is very difficult to keep up with your favorite news and websites on a daily or weekly basis. News aggregators like Google News constantly update important stories. Popular blogs publish 20+ posts every day. This process goes on 24 hours. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the information overload. RSS solves this problem quite well. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It simplifies information gathering and processing and ultimately makes you more productive by delivering more information in less time.

Information Delivered To You

Traditionally information is published by websites and blogs at their own schedule. Visitors had to go to their URL to view the content. This has a few drawbacks. Firstly, the user has to remember the website URL for future visits. More importantly the current website content must be compelling enough to draw the user back for subsequent visits. RSS is an alternate information delivery model. Instead of visiting websites and reading their content, viewers can subscribe to new material or website changes. The Syndicated content is delivered to a RSS reader. Thus the user no longer has to visit 10 websites to check for updated content - the RSS reader does that automatically.

Should Everyone Use RSS?

RSS won’t solve all your problems. But it will help you to stay informed on current events. Believe or not RSS is not for everyone. If you think Google News or BBC is the only website you need to stay current then you can have dedicated browser window or tab for it. The website will refresh its content and as long as you are on the website you will stay informed. RSS comes in handy when you have more than a few sources of content which are updated frequently. If you are an information junkie (like me) then using RSS will help you gather more content with less effort.

Benefits Of RSS

Engadget and gizmodo are two gadget blogs which have almost 50 new articles every day. To stay updated with both sites subscribe to both of them in a RSS feed reader. Then you can receive all the updates without visiting either website. This translates into less effort on your part but with the same result. Another benefit is to receive mostly advertising free content. Some blogs do include some advertising in their feeds. But for the most part it is an ad free - content only version of the website.

This post is part of the RSS Series. The next post in the series will discuss the types of RSS reasers. Subscribe to TeqEdge blog today so that you don’t miss any updates tomorrow.

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