RSS - a tool for handling incoming & outgoing information streams
Originally published for paying Patreon members on 2017-11-13. Republished here after a 90-day patron-first period.
It's not true that "digital natives" know all there is to know about managing information online. Knowing how to use tools and techniques for tailoring your information flow is an essential survival tool these days, so I created a mini-course on what I called "infotention" for my Cal and Stanford students.
Probably the most powerful infotention tool, once you learn how to use it, is RSS.
RSS ("really simple syndication") is a way to set up specific streams of information that come to you. That's the simplest way to think about it.
A little more formally: "RSS is a relatively simple tool for sharing and distributing content through a common standard for describing content data elements (i.e. title, summary, description, etc.) so that they can be published with a common understanding about how they should be parsed and displayed. Syndication extends published content so that it reaches more readers, igniting community as content is shared and responses posted. Sites would become nodes in a network where content is shared in all directions, weaving the microcommunities together." (Jon Lebkowsky)
RSS is a web format that allows users to create standardized web feeds that anyone can read with a single aggregator program, or "feed reader." Instead of visiting different websites to see what has been posted recently, users can automatically see the headlines, first paragraphs, or entire posts from a menu of many websites via a one page dashboard (either a web page or a page on a standalone application known as an "RSS aggregator.") RSS feeds are used to syndicate regularly updated websites, such as blogs, video, news sites, and all kinds of other data. Through RSS, users no longer need to refresh websites individually looking for new posts or articles, or follow a host of links just to stay current, but can monitor a wide range of sites and data in one place. Aggregator programs can be web-based, a desktop app, or integrated into another program such as an email client or web browser.
RSS sounds simple and technical, but it's also a fundamental building block that will remain useful as a kind of user-generated pipeline that can be combined with other pipelines to provide incoming and outgoing information streams about specific subjects. I asked my students to each set up an RSS reader and tune it to their interests, selecting and tuning an incoming flow of information about specific topics through blogs, social bookmarking feeds, and directed searches. From this stream of incoming information, they found that they could harvest, contextualize, and use significant findings as part of their blogging.
RSS Exercise:
Watch RSS in Plain English
Set up a feed reader using Feedly or Netvibes, populate it with 10-50 feeds that apply to your beat, browse and read daily for at least one week; report on your experience.
Conduct a news search through Yahoo and/or Google News advanced news search sites or other searches that provide RSS feeds (such as Instant RSS Search).
(I asked my students to) Submit search strings that are sufficiently unique to your interests or to your project, then add the RSS feeds for those searches to your RSS reader subscription list and follow it for at least one week; report on your experience in your learning journal and in the group's project page.
Remember that RSS is a flow, not a queue: sample it, don't try to keep up.
RSS Resources
RSS Resources from the Social Media Classroom wiki (with complete how-to information and lists of resources)
Howard Rheingold's RSS bookmarks