As hard as it may be to believe for those of us who live in RSS, both from a content production and content viewing perspective, RSS and the associated feed readers remain vastly under-utilized by most adults.  Over the past weeks I asked many adults if they use RSS or a feed reader to manage their online reading.  Only one person used a feed reader.  Very few even knew what feed reader are.  In fact, I showed one reasonably tech-savvy friend how to use Google Reader.  He told me a day or two later that Google Reader had completely changed the way he approached the internet.  He loved it.

Meanwhile, many of my adult friends continue to consume the internet inefficiently and ineffectively by bouncing around from one website to another, in search of content that could so easily be centralized via Google Reader.  Yes, there are other feed readers, but they are more complicated and, frankly, not as good as Google Reader.

Wikipedia defines a feed reader as follows: “A feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.”  In other words, you can take all that content that you run all over the place trying to find and read, and you can put it in one centralized place.  It puts you, not the various website developers and their advertisers, in charge of how you consume online information.  For those (and you know who you are) who continue to claim that the internet is a dangerous and scary place- Google Reader is perfect for you.  You get the content you’re after right from Google.  And while Google is certainly trying to corner the market on data storage and online advertising, it’s certainly not going to rob you or give you a computer virus.  As an aside, most of the people I know who are scared of the internet already have computer viruses because they are too afraid to find and update an anti-virus program, yet not afraid to open love emails and other obviously bogus missives from people they don’t know.

RSS feeds are not just for blogs.  Just about every newspaper, online news source and other content provider has RSS feeds.  Generally, they have many, broken down in a news, weather, sports, etc. manner.  Here is a list of Yahoo’s feeds.  Here are CNN’s.  And here are the feeds for the New York Times.  If you find all that stuff too boring, here’s mine.

There is one slight drawback to feeds.  Lots of people use full feeds, which means that the entire story appears within the feed reader.  Many news sources, however, are psychologically bound to the dying advertising model that traditionally paid their bills.  So some of them use partial feeds, which show only a headline and sometimes a summary within the feed reader.  You have to click through to the provider’s story (e.g., to its website) to read the whole thing.  This is a pain in the ass, but even so, feed readers are still the best way to organize and access your online content.  As another aside, big media can probably get away with partial feeds for a few more years, but anyone else who uses partial feeds is begging not to be read.  If Mashable and TechCrunch can make full feeds available, then so can you.  And if you don’t, many others with the same or better content will.  As you can tell, I really don’t like partial feeds.

Back to Google Reader and why you need it.

Here’s a video by the folks who developed Google Reader explaining all the great things Google Reader will do for you (link for feeds).

So what are you waiting for?  Go give it a whirl.  It will change your (online) life.

One of the primary purposes of Newsome.Org is to introduce and explain computer-related programs and features to other in-betweeners like me- people who are the parents of the youngsters to whom computers and the internet are as integral as the telephone and the children of our parents who have no intention of ever embracing computers.

People in this 35-60 group are in an odd situation. Most have, perhaps begrudgingly, accepted computers as a tool to help them work- at least as far as emails and light word processing goes. But to many, anything beyond that is unfamiliar and confusing. Because I am the neighborhood computer geek, I get a lot of questions about technology. Over the years, two things have become clear. One, many in-betweeners view computers as a chore themselves as opposed to a method to make chores easier. Two, with a little work these same people can and will learn how to make computers work for them. There is always an initial hesitation (“I don’t understand all of that,” “If I give a web site my personal information, my identity will be stolen immediately, etc.”), but these folks have been around technology long enough to pick up more than they think via osmosis and to become comfortable around technology. That’s a valuable head start that will significantly lower the learning curve.

So let’s talk about one way we can make computers work for us. Anyone reading this knows how to send email, so we’ll skip that. Let’s talk about the second most commonly used benefit of computers and the internet: information gathering.

Any information gathering process starts with Google‘s web search. But there are other ways to get even more specific information. Let’s talk about newsgroups.

First, let’s address some terms, that may sound alike, but are not the same thing:

Newsgroups. A newsgroup (focus on the group half, not the news half) is a central list of messages, organized by topic, posted by many users at different locations. Stated another way, newsgroups are discussion groups where people discuss, teach, inquire about, etc. a topic of presumed common interest. For example, there are newsgroups about fishing, hunting, quilting- just about everything. A newsgroup looks similar to the list of email in your inbox, the difference being that the messages are composed by a large group of people from all over the world. From a technical perspective newsgroups are different from web-based message boards, like Songwriting.Org, but from an end user and experience perspective, they are similar. There are two ways to read newsgroups: via a newsgroup reader, such as Outlook Express (which is almost certainly already installed on your computer) or via the web through everyone’s favorite web site, Google. Newsgroup readers have to be configured, which, while not terribly hard to do, is more than a lot of people want to do (recall my mantra- if you want people to use technology, make technology easy to use). Reading newsgroups via Google is much easier. You can find groups you’re interested in via the search box, click on the link to read the messages and “subscribe” or bookmark the group by clicking on the link at the top of the list of messages. Here is a screenshot showing what a typical newsgroup looks like in Outlook Express:

and here is what one looks like via Google.

So why in the world would anyone want to read newsgroups? Simple, to get answers to questions. When I am trying to fix a computer problem, a broken toilet or almost any other problem, I start by searching the newsgroups, via Google. Very few problems haven’t already been solved by someone else and most of those solutions are readily accessible via newsgroups. Most of the hard computer or software problems I have encountered were solved via suggestions I read on newsgroups. And most of the time, you don’t even have to post a question to get the answer. Just search for the problem and you’ll generally find that someone else has already asked it and received an answer.

News Readers and RSS. For some strange reason, the programs that read RSS, which is a relatively new method of distribtuing web site content (like the content on this page) are confusingly called news readers (focus on the readers half, not the news half). They are also called RSS readers, feed readers and feed aggregators. The content displayed by these programs is repackaged web site content, not newsgroups. It’s confusing, but think of it as newsgroups (Google just calls them groups) where a group of people post messages and news readers that allow you to read news (and other content) posted by people like me on their web sites.

News: Don’t get traditional news sites, such as CNN or Google News confused with the stuff we talked about above. Those are traditional news sites, with traditional news. You can usually read that content through a newsreader (look for the RSS link), but that’s the only connection between those sites and newsgroups and newsreaders.

So what do I use for all this? There are many good programs. Here’s what I use:

Reading Newsgroups: Outlook Express, more than likely the program you use to send email from home. I use Outlook (a more robust program with a similar name) for email, but I use Outlook Express to read newsgroups.

Searching Newsgroups: Google. There is no substitute. If I find a group I like, I’ll subscribe to it via Outlook Express, but as mentioned above, you can easily read and post directly from Google.

Newsreader: Onfolio, which has many great features. There are also web based newsreaders. Of the ones on that list, I have tried and liked Newsgator and Bloglines. Both are free.

Once you go to the effort to set these programs up, they make it easy to find, collect and store information. It’s a little learning time now that is repaid with interest when you need information fast.

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rss, newsgroups, beginner tips