Organization is a problem for quite a few folks (myself included). It is just too easy in our modern world of never ending distraction to sift through the terabytes of material to find just what we want. The solution to that kind of disorganization has actually been around for over a decade. RSS feeds were one of the earliest tools of the internet, but they have become even more efficient with the explosion of smart phones and tablet computers.
If you have never been exposed to them, you may find yourself asking, what are RSS feeds? RSS is an acronym referring to “Rich Site Summary” feeds, though they are more commonly known by their nickname, Really Simple Syndication. But what are RSS feeds good for, and what are RSS feeds supposed to do? That is the beautiful part. They take content from areas of the web that you specify, and they deliver that content in a form that is easy to scan (you initially see a headline and a quick summary) and easy to open on MANY different devices and programs.
Nearly every corner of the internet has an RSS feed. Gardening? Home improvement? Sports? The stock market? There are RSS feeds for all of them, and once you have your feeds set up, you can get material from these sources in a neatly organized way. Take news for example. It is so easy to get overwhelmed by all of the news sources at your disposal. You can organize by targeting the news RSS feeds that YOU prefer. Just about every news site has a feed. If you want general news, you can use the Yahoo News RSS. If business and financial articles are your thing, you might choose to subscribe to the Reuters RSS. If you want a daily dose of your Fair and Balanced cable news, you can get the Fox News RSS. RSS feeds are very easy to customize, thus making your life easier and more organized.
If all of this was around in the 1990s, what are RSS feeds doing as the focal point of an article in 2013? The new development in this technology involves the method of delivery. In the past, an RSS feed would be delivered to your email inbox, and you would have to sift through the many different emails from each feed that you subscribed to. Even when smart phones were in their infancy, all that changed was that you would do the email sifting on a smaller screen. This has all been made MUCH easier with the advent of app based portable computing. There are now programs, like the Google news reader for one, that collate and organize your RSS feeds for you. These new readers can be used on Droids, iPhones, iPads, other tablet computers, and even the newer model Kindles. These new devices have revitalized an old, but still useful, technology.