The following is a slightly edited and abridged version of the best explanation of RSS I’ve seen on the Internet. If you’re not doing it already or have no clue what RSS is and were afraid to ask, this is your ticket to ride. I promise not to tell if you’re one of my new rss feeders connecting in this week.

The article is written by Ryan Holliday and was featured on Tim Ferriss’ blog. It will really simplify your life … and filter the information you’re needlessly bombarding yourself with each day. If you’re looking for someone to try it out with, start by RSS’ing me. If that’s too scary, read on …

“RSS—Really Simple Syndication

This comes as a shock to everyone in the tech crowd, but most people don’t use RSS.

If you don’t use it, you should start. It can fundamentally simplify your online life.

Why would you check back to your favorite people’s sites everyday to see if they’ve posted when you can be updated only when it happens? RSS does to your web habits what Tivo did to your television–utterly revolutionizes it. Grab Google Reader and subscribe to Tim‘s [or Dane's] feed here.

Robert Scoble reads 600+ feeds a day, which nearly no one should, but if you subscribe to his feed, he’s filtering those 600+ for you, hence his nickname, the “human aggregator.” [From Tim, as true with all brackets: Rather than browsing the web for what you need and getting distracted by the irrelevant but interesting, RSS essentially gives you your own personal newspaper with carefully selected content. Here a general rule of thumb – The 70% Surfing Rule: if you surf vs. subscribe, assume you will spend at least 70% of your online time consuming interesting instead of actionable information, and 70% of the time, you won’t return to the task you initially set out to complete].

RSS is the first but casual line of defense in your war for efficient information consumption.

Tips for Using RSS Effectively:

1) Don’t Use Categories
Organizing all your feeds by genre is tempting but will burn you out. It is better to list them all out in a single view and use the “j” and “k” shortcuts [hitting the “j” key move you down, hitting the “k” moves you up] on Google Reader to navigate your feeds. This inserts variety into your daily read and lets valuable material stand out, as opposed to reading 30 posts in a row from the same author.

2) Don’t check it on the weekends
By batching it up and adding a sense of urgency to the process, you’re much less likely to waste time on crap. Be ruthless. If it’s good and you miss it, it will come back to you, I promise.

3) Clean House
You’re in charge. Your time is valuable. You’re too good to put up with someone who phones it in. If your friend told boring or pointless stories, would you call them up in the middle of the day and give them your uninterrupted attention? If an author isn’t delivering consistently, cut them out. If they ever improve enough to be worth reading again, you’ll probably hear about it.

4) If it Piles Up, Throw it Away
If you fall too far behind, don’t dedicate 4 hours to catching up on 1,256 posts. Just click “Mark All As Read” and move on.”

To read the rest of this excellent article, click here.

Keep it simple.
-Dane

PS … the post from last night’s wedding is coming soon!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.