Re: Can someone explain what's so great about RSS?

On Jul 31, 2005, at 6:12 PM, Justin Patrin wrote:

Perhaps I simply haven't seen the right programs. What is a good aggregator that can keep track of new things and allow me to read them at any time?

On the mac, I really like NetNewsWire. I haven't used any windows/linux products enough to know what works best there. When I'm not on my mac I tend to use bloglines.com (and have NNW set up to use their web services interface so that items I've read on bloglines show up as read on my mac)

I can understand a bit from the website maintainer's perspective as mailing lists can be troublesome, but I personally like my e-mail just fine. It keeps track of what I've seen and not, I can get news, bug reports, and CVS commit information all in one place, and it's *push* instead of *pull*....for real.

I use it to follow >250 feeds and most of the time find it far preferable to email. I doubt I could follow all of the entries in all of those feeds arriving via email. And I much prefer that my reader usually highlights changes in entries rather than all new entries. There are times when I wish more would be done to deal with duplicate items, such as when the same story shows up across all five BBC News feeds I read, but pre-atom there hasn't always been a good entry ID system in place, and I understand from conversations with people at the BBC that it's a complicated matter to keep track of when a regularly revised story becomes a _new_ story.

One thing that I really don't get is that with RSS you end up downloading the same thing multiple times. You get the same news over and over with sometimes a new entry or 2. With "podcasting" (argh) doesn't this mean you'll be downloading the same content over and over? And hence the website has increased traffic and bandwidth requirements.

Good aggregators should respect relevant HTTP codes for not changed, and there are always discussions of the best way to just send updated content. It is more traffic, but most of the time the content being sent is very simple and sending email consumes its fair share of server resources too. James.