RSS to the Rescue

The web is changing so rapidly these days, it is difficult for people to keep up with all the information available online. I remember when I first started surfing the web several years ago. Sometimes I would find an article or website I liked, and I wanted to receive updates whenever it had new information to provide. Receiving updates then involved signing up to the website, providing my email information, and checking my email regularly to see if I'd received any update notices. At the time, this worked well enough because I didn't receive a lot of emails in those early days. Every email was exciting and wonderful.

A few years ago, spamming was invented. Well, maybe it's been more than a few years now, but it didn't hit my inbox until about 2006 (maybe I was a lucky one). My Internet activity increased greatly that year, and I found myself inundated with hundreds of unwanted emails. I would mark them as spam so they would be filtered out, but I learned to dread checking my email. During that time, I lost contact with many websites I had enjoyed, as I would accidentally delete their emails or incorrectly mark one of their update emails as spam, tragically ensuring I would never hear from them again.

Apparently, this issue has affected many web users. To combat the problem of keeping interested parties notified of updates, a format called Really Simple Syndication - or RSS for short - was invented.* Similar to bookmarking a website page, RSS allows users to subscribe to updates called "feeds", which are delivered directly to your RSS reader. Some browsers like Firefox or Safari have these readers built into them. Since I use Firefox, this helpful feature saved me the extra step of downloading a reader onto my computer. When I subscribe to an RSS, Firefox automatically saves a folder in my Bookmark area that I can access and see the feeds currently available for that RSS.

RSS feeds are easy to subscribe to, as websites provide bright orange buttons to click on which bring you to an area that walks you through the quick subscription process. Mozilla Firefox browser originally created an RSS logo that was since adopted by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook in December of 2005. The logo is a picture of audio waves, and it looks like this:
Another common icon for RSS is an orange button with XML written on it, used by many websites because RSS is written in the Internet coding language XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Here is that icon:
For my librarianship class, we are studying RSS feeds this week, so I wanted to find one that deals with my topic of library digitization. I found a very interesting blog called "the future is yesterday", which has updates and sometimes discusses my chosen topic. I found this blog's February 10, 2006 article, titled "More details on Internet Archive’s Scribe Book Scanner Project", very interesting and relevant to my topic. The article discusses how small scale digitization projects are being implemented using digital cameras and mirrors to take pictures of book pages, which can then be uploaded to a virtual archive. It was worth the read, and I look forward to seeing what new articles this blogger may produce in the future. To facilitate doing so, I have added a link to its RSS feed, which is listed to the top right of this blog.


*RSS information and logos obtained from: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library/What_Is_RSS.shtml and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS