New Tools for Reporting

RSS , an abbreviation for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, or ‘Rich Site Summary’, is a format used by news sites and weblogs for distributing content.

RSS feeds include headlines, abstracts and other information, allowing RSS readers to search the feeds you have chosen and pull in the latest information from them.

Nearly all weblogs publish RSS feeds and most news sites now publish them, meaning that you can get just about any type of online content via RSS.

As a self-confessed techno-phobe, the simple thought of experimenting with something new on the Web terrifies me!

With assisstance from John Dube, I suprisingly found RSS feeds easy to manage, not to mention extremely efficient and highly informative.

As I have discussed in a previous post, we are a time poor demographic and RSS feeds certainly enable a user to be exposed to an array of information in the most time efficient manner.

In 2004, the Communications Industry Forecast found that 10.04 hours of media was consumed every day and predicted that by 2009 we will all be consuming an additional hour of media a day.

As argued by JD Lassica, RSS feeds can be used to eliminate information overload.

“The explosion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a problem for any info-warrior: Who the heck has time to read all this stuff? Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN”.

As an impending journalist, however, it is my concern that my future career may be spent filtering through numerous RSS, not creatively investigating the next big story.