Current is&t Issue

Volume 20

No. 4  March/April 2005

RSS: Get the News You Want When You Want It

• Robyn Fizz

Whether you’re a news junkie or just want to stay on top of the latest developments in your field, RSS can streamline your online browsing experience. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary). News reader software based on RSS displays current headlines from your favorite sources (e.g., The Boston Globe, Wired News, releases from the MIT News Office). Once you select a headline, you’ll generally see a short summary and a link to the full story.

You can subscribe to feeds from any publication that offers them, tailoring your choices along the way. The New York Times alone offers over 30 different feeds, ranging from Arts to International to Week in Review. Best of all, you can read your customized content at no charge. There are free news readers (also called news aggregators) for each platform, and there are no subscription fees for RSS feeds.

Not Just Your Standard News
While many people use RSS to tap into world or local news, there are many other types of RSS feeds. Adobe Systems, for example, offers a feed for each of its software applications. An Apple feed lists new releases from the iTunes Store. You can sign up for a daily Dilbert cartoon or keep track of your favorite web logs. If you follow an NPR feed to the full story, you can listen to an audio version – just as if you were listening to the radio.

Closer to home, MIT’s Stellar course management system now offers a novel use of RSS: class web sites with feeds. Students who subscribe get the most recent announcements, class materials, and assignments, plus alerts one week before an assignment’s due date. For other examples of MIT RSS feeds, including feeds from IS&T, see Surf Sites in this issue.

The Technology Score
RSS is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). If you’re visiting a web site and see a button – often orange – labeled “XML,” that button links to an RSS feed. If you don’t see XML buttons at a given site, try typing “RSS” in the site’s search engine: it may take you to a page of feeds.

In order to subscribe to and read RSS feeds, you need news reader software. While IS&T does not currently recommend or support any newsreaders, you can find out more about RSS and available newsreaders online.

RSS is not as widely used as email or web browsing, but it’s likely to take off once it’s incorporated into popular web browsers. It’s due in the next release of Apple’s Safari browser and is already built into Mozilla’s Firefox, which runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux machines.

Getting Started
If you’d like some guidance before setting up a news reader, attend IS&T’s free RSS Quick Start. Sessions will be held on May 19 and June 16 at noon in the N42 Demo Center.

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