Take advantage of RSS feeds

So, maybe you’ve heard of RSS, maybe not. If you haven’t you first need to head over to this link and watch a brief video demo and explanation by Amanda Congdon (formerly of RocketBoom.com). Or watch the new video below:

Now that you have an idea of what RSS is you can start using it like there’s no tomorrow. Why would I ever use this cool technology, here is a list of the things RSS feeds do for me:

- Notify me of when my awesome TA posts his lecture slides
- Deliver most popular links on the internet (via del.icio.us)
- Keep me up to date on Apple rumors
- Notify me when new versions of my applications are out
- Deliver results of saved PubMed searches (authors, topics, journals, institutions)
- Notify me when my favorite blogs are updated
- Gets me my CU campus news
- Tracks my saved eBay searches
- Tells me when friends upload photos to Flickr or Picasa Web Albums
- Tells me the most popular MATLAB code on the MathWorks website
- Gives me my baseball news through ESPN.com
- Delivers the “quotes of the day”

It only takes me 10 minutes a day to read all of the posts from these feeds I subscribe to. Which is way more efficient then manually checking all of these websites and closely inspecting them for new content.

With the size and speed of growth of the internet you have to make the information come to you, and RSS can help make this happen.