2005 – A new way to get the news

Still reading newspapers and watching the alphabet channels? Ever talk to those guys that seem to know what’s going on in the world even before the news reporters and newspapers?

Chances are they are getting their news from the Net. With all the newsites that the internet offers, “which are reliable?” you may be thinking. Add to that the new phenomena of blogging. How can one view all these news and reports and make any sense of it? Welcome the world of RSS agregation!

What is RSS you may ask. It stands for Rich Site Syndication or Really Simple Syndication, depends on who you talk to. RSS will provide a “snapshot” of the site’s contents in the form of headlines, allowing you to get a glimpse of all the news provided by the site for the past week, month, etc..

Why would you want this feature? If you’re like most you get your news from a variety of sources, news.yahoo.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc, cnn, etc.. If your news site provides RSS feeds, than you can use what’s called an RSS aggregator to give you a snapshot view of your site’s headlines. If you’re a yahoo user, you may already be using RSS without even knowing it! For example, in the my.yahoo.com (assuming you have an yahoo account), you’ll see all your preferred news sites given to you all at once. What yahoo is doing is agreggating all the various news sites into one location.

There are many RSS aggregators available out there, but one that I find very helpful is Sage. It’s an RSS aggregator that fits as a nice plugin for your Firefox browser. Here’s a quick description per the sage.mozdev.org website:

Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.

Mozilla Firefox has the native ability to detect which sites provide RSS feeds by giving you a little speaker icon on the bottom right-hand corner of your browser. By clicking on that icon, you’ll automatically bookmark that RSS feed into your bookmarks folder. However, how can you view all those bookmarked feeds?

This is where Sage really shines. After installing Sage, you can hit Alt-S on your firefox browser and see all your bookmarked RSS feeds in the default “Sage Feeds” folder in your bookmarks. Keep that left pane open and and everytime you visit a site look for the XML/RSS/Atom links and drag those links on the left pane. Sage will automatically subscribe you to that RSS feed. Now every time you click on those Sage bookmakrs, you’ll be presented with all the headlines of a given site you’ve subscribed to.

Note: Subscription is a pull-subscription, meaning you control when you get your news. Nothing is sent to you like an email subscription – no spam to worry about!

As the Internet grows, RSS aggregation becomes all the more required in sifting through all the news sites you encounter. So in ’05, try this new way of getting the news. Get started, download Firefox if you haven’t already and install the sage plugin!