Workflow Automation

If you have used the Internet in the last couple of years, you probably have either heard the term “RSS” or seen those little orange wavy line icons. You even may know what the acronym stands for, or that RSS is based on XML. There’s no point in going into details. Who cares?! Because none of that really answers “What can RSS do for me?”

In reality, RSS is one of those things that once you understand the benefits, you’ll be using it left and right, and constantly thinking of ways RSS can improve your online experience. It is also kind of a catch-22. You won’t really see the benefits until you start using RSS “feeds”, but you probably won’t start using RSS until you understand the benefits.

In a nutshell, RSS summarizes information from a “source“, puts it into a well-known standard format, and allows a “reader” application to display it in a useful format. The real magic begins when you realize just how many information-generators can be a “source”, and the fact that you will probably find “readers” in many of the applications you are already using.

This icon indicates a RSS feed is available:

Information Sources are varied and numerous. Your favorite world news site, your town newspaper, your local weather station, and your friend’s blogs almost always produce RSS feeds with the latest updates. Many news sites break up RSS feeds into distinct categories such as Technology News, Entertainment, World News, etc. so you only need to subscribe to the news sources you are interested it.

Diving a little deeper, you can find RSS feeds that update every time a stock on your watch list sends out a press release. Your banking site can produce a RSS feed with your latest transactions. You can even have your favorite travel site generate a RSS feed with the latest airfares from your hometown to Acapulco, and make your buy when you see the price you like.

Since RSS is based on a standard, your company’s application programmers can generate RSS feeds from company data, such as new sales or transaction data.

Your Reader takes these RSS feeds and displays up-to-date summaries of the data in a easy to read, consistent format. Most of the time, the summaries are combined with other frequently checked data, such as your email in-box and/or home page. If you use My Yahoo, or Google’s personal (iGoogle) home page, it is a fairly trivial matter to add a RSS feed to your main page. That way you can combine your often used home page information (stock prices, weather forcasts, etc.) with information from your RSS feeds (news articles from your favorite web site, your sister’s sewing blog, etc.) Most email programs such as Outlook and Thunderbird, and web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, have methods to add your RSS feeds.

This is what several RSS feeds look like in My Yahoo:

Ultimately, all of your important information is in one place, and in a consistent format. You can tell at a glance if there is something you want to read up on without having to visit and remember multiple web sites. You can even group your feeds into related areas, such as “work” and “play”.

So, as long as you don’t get bogged down by acronyms and techno-babble, RSS is actually a very useful, and time saving technology. Try it, you’ll like it. (even this blog provides RSS feeds)