In a comment thread over the weekend, Chris Smith observed that using RSS feeds can greatly enhance citizens' ability to track issues and receive the kinds of information they're interested in. I responded that others, like me, might not be familiar with what RSS is or does, and would anyone care to write a Guest Post on it? Within an hour, Chris sent me a first draft. I had to ask for additional information ... and here it is.

Chris is a Northwest District Association neighborhood resident who is the founder of Portland Transport. He also chairs the Portland Streetcar Citizens Advisory Committee and serves on the board of Portland Streetcar, Inc.

What is RSS and why might citizens with overflowing e-mail inboxes care about it?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication [see the Wikipedia entry for more: RSS]. The easiest way to think about it is as a ‘headline service’. It provides you with the title and usually a summary (or sometimes the entire content) of a blog post, news article, or other piece of electronic content.

Where do you get RSS feeds? Virtually every blog has an RSS feed. RSS existed before blogs, but blogs made it popular. It’s a way to keep up with blogs without obsessively clicking refresh on the home page of a dozen different blogs. Most news organizations now have RSS feeds for their online content (this is true of the Oregonian, WWeek, Mercury and the Trib). In fact, many e-mail listservs now have an RSS feed option as an alternate way to read the list messages.

So why might someone prefer to keep track of things in RSS versus e-mail? There are several reasons:

1) There are many flavors of RSS readers, and you can pick one that fits your style of reading. I like Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) myself, but you can follow RSS feeds on your Google or Yahoo home pages, and you can get programs for your PC or Mac that read RSS feeds. Indeed, the current versions of most web browsers (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari) all include RSS reading capabilities.

2) You can read RSS feeds very quickly. Unlike e-mail where you have to click and open the message to read it, you can scroll through one page of RSS headlines that contains the equivalent of dozens of e-mail messages.

3) You don’t have to decide what to keep or delete. When I deal with e-mail, I have to decide if I’m going to save and file the message or delete it. With RSS, once I’ve read it, it’s gone (some readers will let you check a box to make an entry hang around). But if you decide later you want to go back to something you read earlier, there is generally a way to look at the archive (Bloglines will let me see all entries for the last 6, 12, 24, 48, 72 hours, last week, or last month for example). So the RSS aggregator is doing your archiving for you.

4) It’s easy to group feeds by theme. For example in Bloglines, I have one folder for transportation-related feeds, another for local political/civic feeds. When I look at each of these my mind is already in the right ‘mindset’ to process the information. You can do this in some e-mail programs, but it’s generally much more difficult to set up.

5) You can share! Most web-based RSS readers will let you export the list of feeds that you read to share with your friends.

Fundamentally I think RSS expands your ability to track information. I’m subscribed to about 50 feeds in Bloglines. That would be equal to hundreds of additional e-mail messages every day. I simply couldn’t keep up in e-mail form.

As an example, here’s how you would subscribe to Amanda’s blog in Bloglines:

a) Go to www.bloglines.com, follow the ‘register’ link and create an account

b) After registering and signing in, go to the www.bloglines.com/myblogs page and click ‘Add’ in the ‘Feeds’ tab.

c) In the box that says ‘Blog or Feed URL:’ type in Amanda’s URL: http://www.amandafritz.com and hit the subscribe button – Bloglines will now find the RSS feed on Amanda’s site.

d) You’ll have the choice to either add Amanda’s feed at your top-level folder or to create a new folder (or put it any existing folder you may already have).

e) After that, Bloglines will update your ‘myblogs’ page whenever there is a new entry on Amanda’s site and you can rest your mouse finger!

Question, Chris: It would show when I post a whole new article, but not when there is a new comment, right? So the "recent posts" feature of my site, which I mentioned in my six+ months review yesterday, is helpful even to folks using RSS, right? Thank you for the technology lesson! ~ Amanda