RSS will change your life!

Looking for one simple way to rev up your technological know-how? This is it.

In a nutshell, RSS (short for lots of things, including Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way for you to find, all in one place, what’s new on your favorite websites.  You “subscribe” to the sites you’re interested in, and then any new content on those sites is delivered to one place, called an aggregator.  Will Richardson, probably the top writer on technology in education, has published a guide to getting started with RSS [PDF].  I couldn’t say it any better, so here’s how he explains some of the things you can do with RSS:

For instance, say you’re a political science teacher and you’ve found 20 or 30 Weblog and media sites on the Internet that are consistently publishing interesting and relevant information for you and your students. Finding the time to click through to those sites and keep abreast of any new information on a regular basis would be nearly impossible. But what if you only had to go to one place to read all of the new content on all of those sites? Wouldn’t be so difficult, would it?

Here’s another scenario: you currently get the headlines from The New York Times via an e-mail message that arrives each morning. But more and more, your e-mail box is being clogged up by spammers selling everything from pornography to mortgages. There are new virus warnings every day. That New York Times content is getting lost in the morass that e-mail has become. Not so with RSS. The New York Times, as well as hundreds of other newspapers, has a number of virus free “feeds” that your aggregator can collect. And in general, you know that everything in your aggregator is something you want to read because you subscribed to it. No ads, no spam, just new content from the sources you read.

Ready to get started?  Go to Richardson’s easy-to-follow guide [PDF] and go for it!  And don’t forget to add TEN’s RSS feed as one of your subscriptions!

Labels: TEN Stuff