RSS Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters
Reading News and Blogs via Really Simple Syndication - Spam Free
Email newsletters are great, but spam is not. The deluge of junk mail has made it increasingly painful to follow the news and what’s happening on your favorite web sites via email.
Either the newsletter you’re eager to read is hidden in a massive spam attack or it doesn’t arrive because your ISP is blocking spam and your favorite newsletter falls victim to the filters, too (now you know why a “false positive” is something negative).
RSS Feeds as an Alternative to Email Newsletters
Fortunately, there is an alternative way to subscribe to the web sites and blogs you visit regularly: RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (there are a number of other explanations, too), and it allows you to “syndicate” news summaries from web sites.
You can use these syndicated RSS “feeds” to display the latest news from mayor newspapers, for example, on your own web site or read them on other sites collecting these feeds.
And There’s no Spam
But you can also display RSS feeds on your desktop and use them like email newsletters. There are special programs called “RSS feed readers” or “RSS aggregators” that, given the URL of an RSS feed will fetch the latest headlines periodically and let you read them comfortably and efficiently (avoiding the info glut so common today).
The best thing about RSS is that if you subscribe to an RSS feed, you only get what you want. If you tell the feed reader to stop collecting a site’s feed, it will stop. And there’s no spam. And there’s no spam!
Using RSS Feeds
Subscribing to an RSS feed is easy.
Now let the feed reader do its aggregating work, and enjoy the news.
RSS and Your Email Program
Today, dedicated programs to read RSS feeds are developed. I find this a little odd. Have you noticed how the useful ones all use the interface known from email? Before long, your favorite email program will be able to read RSS news, I hope. I really want to read RSS feeds in my email program.
Email clients are the natural environment for Usenet news, email and RSS feeds. These methods of following news are strikingly similar, and aggregating them all in the same powerful program has many benefits.
