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Pinnacle Resource Center RSS Delivers News on Demand - Financial and Otherwise Most people have favorite websites they visit each day. But with information overload growing, the daily habit of scanning these sites can waste a lot of time, particularly when only a few sites contain new stories worth reading immediately. Using a Web standard called RSS, you can access customized news feeds quickly and easily, without having to scour the Web. RSS is a great way to manage the tons of financial-related information on the web and stay up to date on the financial topics that interest you most. Of course, you can use it for personal interests like travel as well. RSS can also be used to track any information that changes frequently, from stock quotes to the weather. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Its purpose is to "feed" you information every time a news source, blog or selected website has been updated with new information. Without realizing it, many people are already using RSS feeds if they've set up a personalized news page on sites such as my.yahoo.com or my.msn.com. By the end of this article, you should know what RSS is and how to use it to make your life easier. Choosing an RSS News Reader To get started, the first thing you need is something called a news reader. Armed with an RSS news reader--a simple, cheap or free application--you can get headlines from your favorite news sites or receive an aggregated news feed on a single topic that includes articles from many Web sources. The feed reader periodically updates your display with new stories; you simply click a headline to read the article. Dozens of news readers are available and new versions are appearing all the time (see below). Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to choose one that will work with your computer. You can either use a web-based reader or one that is application-based. Web-based readers let you access your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications store subscriptions on your main computer. The difference is similar to web-based email, such as Yahoo, versus an application-based email program, such as MS Outlook. Popular RSS Readers Awasu. Easy-to-navigate and highly customizable. For other news reader options, visit http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/directory/5/aggregators. Finding and Adding Feeds Once you've got a news reader, you need to subscribe to some sites! To find and add RSS channels, look at Web sites for orange buttons labeled RSS or XML. Most are indicated by an image like this: You can use this icon to add the website to your feed. SmartMoney for instance, has about 18 different features you can receive via RSS feed, simply by clicking on their RSS icon and selecting the feature you want fed. Forbes has RSS feeds for everything from business/industry specific news to articles on wine and food. BusinessWeek, The Motley Fool and Kiplinger.com provide RSS feeds of the latest information available on their websites. Not every site offers an RSS feed yet, but large news organizations like The New York Times and CNN.com offer specific RSS channels catering to interests ranging from movies to technology. RSS readers can be set to check for news every few minutes or every few days -- or turned off completely. If a topic or RSS news feed about a specific topic begins to bore you, just delete the channel. Great Sites for Finding Feeds Every reader includes a list of sites to get you started--sometimes hundreds of them, usually organized into categories like the sections of a newspaper. Here are some places where you can find more news feeds. Topix lists feeds for 150,000 categories of information. To learn more about the basics of RSS feeds, visit www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial or www.rss.softwaregarden.com/aboutrss.html. |
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