News

I spent the majority of this week at a conference and in dinners and networking events, and as a result, I have fallen woefully behind my regular catching up on news and reading. Opening my RSS reader to see 400 unread articles was a little overwhelming, but it gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I do really need to know. I’m insatiably curious, meaning I constantly seek new information and something to learn. Oftentimes, this is to the detriment of my ability to focus or even retain the information I consume. But it is how I am wired and I expect this is not uncommon. How do I strike a healthy balance between feeding this craving for novelty and maintaining sanity? ...

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS. ...