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

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? 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. 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.

I think you are right when you say you haven't seen the right program yet. A good aggregator will implement caching so you are not downloading the same thing over and over again. I don't know about the core processes of Thunderbird, but it implements RSS to look just like your email so you can "subscribe" to someone's blog as you would subscribe to this listserv. Coming from an Academic Library, it is a very hot technology for libraries. Think of your library publishing a "what's new" list that gives you an up-to-date list of what new books they have added to the collection or a journal (or magazine) allowing you to get a snippet of each article with a pointer to the actual full-text article. In my mind RSS is great for publishing and allowing users to subscribe. And since it is an XML standard, it's very easy for web site developers to add it to their website since it's just another output format. Check out some library technology websites to read more about RSS from a Library prospective. Since it's a hot topic, you will easily find some very fascinating articles.