Simple?

Really Simple Syndication?

RSS represents a major change in information management.  Vance has asked me to address RSS and to try to explain my thoughts about it.

"This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year. Newly created information is distributed in four storage media – print, film, magnetic, and optical – and seen or heard in four information flows – telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. The study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows.....

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.
3. Information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless."

From -   How Much Information, 2003

We are awash in a sea of information... 

We are awash in a sea of information.  Our primitive brain structure does not have the capacity to analyze all the possible combinations of information in a usable manner.  For that reason, we are rapidly developing prosthetic methods of information management. One important prostheses has been Really Simple Syndication.

Take the time to peruse some or all of the following reading before you continue.  Don't try to understand everything at once, but try to get a feel for how RSS routes information to the user.  The specifics are not as important as the general.  If you can, try to set up a bloglines account and subscribe to a couple of RSS feeds so you can see how it works. 

Readings:

• RSS, from Wikipedia
• RSS, from BBC
• How to Set Up Bloglines as Your Aggregator or Using Bloglines (this one is a bit more detailed)
• Great tutorial on How to Set Up RSS Feeds on Firefox Browser, from findfeeds.net
• Content Feeds With RSS 2.0, by IBM
• RSS Compendium from Google
• RSS Space Defined from the Read/Write Blog and a chart derived from the data. 
• GMail as an RSS Feeder
• The Birth of the Newsmaster: The Network Starts to Organize Itself, by Robing Good.