RSS+Feeds+2

Does RSS have a place in modern internet culture today? Will it have more of a place in the future?

Source 1: http://www.whatisrss.com/ RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News. Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use. A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines , and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers. Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.
 * What is RSS?**
 * Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS**
 * What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators**

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[|Google Reader Play] is a full-screen treatment that shows you an image, video, or text from websites that are popular on [|Google Reader]. You can navigate from page to page with right and left arrows at the sides of the screen, or by selecting a site from the assorted options below. You don't have to be signed in to use it, although if you are you'll have more control over the type of content you're seeing: when you use Google Reader Play from your account, you can star an item for later, say that you like it to be shown similar content in the future, and share it with friends.

The interface is certainly easy to use on a desktop, although not ideal for sorting through a large number of feeds if you're looking for news or a specific site. But where it's really going to shine is on a tablet, where the large display, simple interaction, and random stream of content lend themselves perfectly to wasting away an afternoon on a couch, scrolling through the best parts of the internet.

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Currently at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, depending on which study's stats you believe, only 17%-32% of RSS users actually know they're using RSS. That's right -- roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, "Huh?" if you asked them what RSS was.

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RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving...

As fulltexting carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news, navigating outside the comfortable walls of RSS required some additional value proposition. Comments were that attractor, and particularly the active threads where the readers could interact with the authors. The result: The Statusphere. And in reaction, the need for social management of the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party. Today, RSS is a shell of its former self...but in the age of abundance it fostered, the core value has shifted from inspiration to the inspired, to the people behind the ideas.

Now [RSS] needs to gracefully step back, blend into the scenery and find a new home in the rich depth we are looking for amid the noise.

Source 5: Fred Wilson [] I think there is some truth to the assertion that Twitter has replaced feed readers for some people. I have never used a feed reader successfully so it hasn't replaced that for me, but I certainly do use Twitter to find links to news and blog posts that I want to read. But RSS i s way more than the readers it spawned. It is a fundamental part of the Internet architecture and is used for all sorts of things. It's the subscribe system of the internet and a 'default function' in the Internet operating system. Kid Mercury, a frequent commenter on [techcrunch] and also its resident "bouncer" said this which I wholeheartedly agree with: //there is only one thing i can say to the "rss is dead" argument: pfft. i think the problem stems from the fact that the geeks embraced RSS and thought it would be a consumer technology. but alas, it was not meant to be. however, i think businesses will need to invest in RSS to create cool things consumers will use, and to help with internal communications systems.// I don't think RSS is going anywhere and I certainly don't think Twiiter is killing RSS.

Source 6: [] Savvy Internet fans in the people's republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there's an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information. Unfortunately, China appears to have finally gotten wise to RSS as of late—reports have been popping up from our readers and around the web of not being able to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year. More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to //all// incoming URLs that begin with "feeds," "rss," and "blog," thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that //aren't// blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless.

FINISHED PRODUCT http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5WT1mo4X2paNzIyMTU5NDQtYmY1OS00YTNkLWEyMjgtNzA2M2Q2MmQzNmM2&hl=en