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August 9, 2006
rss enterprise
RSS, for those of you who don't know, is a standard that allows you to subscribe to web sites. You fire up a program called an RSS reader and it displays all the latest posts from the web sites to which you subscribe. It's been around for a while. In fact, my painful refit 14 months ago was to make this site RSS-compatible.
But personally, I hated using RSS. I want to see content in the web site for which it was intended, not as plain text in some reader. I've recently changed my mind. Google changed it. They got RSS right.
As part of their excellent toolbar (which I installed for its spell-checking feature—it allows you to spell-check forms in your web browser, like blog or discussion group postings), they include a Subscribe button. When a web site is RSS-compatible, the button is active. Click it, and you subscribe to the site. This is nothing new. What is new: it shows you all the content to which you subscribe in newspaper headline form, on the Google web page. You can display headlines for news, sports, weather, stocks, movies, blogs, your own email—the possibilities are endless—any time you open Google. Which is a lot. I made it my home page, and it's completely changed how I surf.
posted by john at 10:23 PM • permalink