Instant News Fed To You

by Eko Prasetyo @ 8:20 PM Newsfeeds. That revolutionary part of internet that enables people to almost discard newspapers completely (I said almost, cost I live in Indonesia, and I believe local newspapers don't rely on the virtual medium yet...) has now become an integral and almost overwhelming part of my life... Everytime I boot up my PC, connect to the net and get my Opera browser going, there'll be more then 30 news fed to me. Yes, 30 at the same time! By the end of day, I'll get over 100 of them! Well, It all started because I need to be smart with 500 Mb quota of data trafficks my ISP set me. First, I tried to save on some sites by registering to their newsletters : PCMags, The Register, The Inquirer. Then I realize that Opera has a newsfeeds section on it's e-mail panel. And then I wondered what it was...I search the need, and finally I found the key : RSS. Really Simple Syndications. There are dozens of other possible abbreviations, but this is the one that keeps on sticking on my mind... I believe my first encounter with RSS was with cnet.com. I clicked on the digital camera review and multifunction device RSS links. After receiving some feeds, then I feel the urge to search for other websites I frequently visit, including those who I had register newsletters : Anandtech, PCMags, MobileBurn, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Rage3D, and a few Yahoogroups mailing lists. Now I have over an archive that listed over 5000 news headlines I have accepted...making it somekind of virtual lybraries of headlines. What? Oh, Headlines? Yes! Most RSSs give you a list of headlines only, with a short sentence explaining the main idea of a news and the link to that news. That's why I love RSS newsfeeds. You don't have to actually visit the websites, which - in my opinion- a rather waste of valuable time since I mostly read just the headlines and some excerpts. With newsfeeds, you just have to read the given headlines, and after that read the whole content of the headlined news. By this way, I have been saving a lot of valuable time and data traffic. But the consequence is that I can sometimes feel that the incoming news can be somewhat overwhelming...especially if I have been away from the Internet. Thousands of headlines flooding your newfeeds section is not that easy to swallow... | My Alter Ego | Blogroll Me! | |