RSS And The Quiet Pleasure Of Following The Web

The web is becoming larger faster than anyone can follow by visiting sites individually. Technorati, which tracks blog growth, estimates that a new blog is created every second in 2006 and that the blogosphere doubles roughly every six months. Technology sites, news pages, personal journals, project logs: the volume is growing faster than reading time.

Visiting twenty websites every morning to check for new posts is possible but inefficient. Most of the time, most sites have not published anything new. You spend most of your checking time finding nothing to read.

RSS solves this problem quietly.

How it works

A website that supports RSS publishes a feed: a machine-readable file in XML format that lists recent posts with their titles, dates, summaries, and links. An RSS reader — a program or web service — checks the feeds you subscribe to at regular intervals and shows you only what is new. Instead of visiting sites, you see what they have published, collected in one place.

The RSS 2.0 specification was finalized by Dave Winer in 2002. The Atom format, a competing standard with similar purpose, was proposed as an IETF standard in 2005. Google Reader launched in October 2005 as a free web-based reader and has become the most widely used. Bloglines (acquired by Ask.com in 2005) is another popular web option; NetNewsWire is well regarded on the Mac.

Firefox 2.0, which launched this October, includes a built-in RSS reader in its Live Bookmarks feature — making RSS more accessible to users who have not found a dedicated reader.

What changes

Following websites through RSS feels different from checking them manually. The most significant change is autonomy over the reading list. There is no editorial algorithm deciding what I should see. A programmer writing for fifty readers appears in the same feed list as a site with millions. A post published three days ago is still waiting if I have not read it yet — the reader does not bury it.

The web feels less ephemeral this way. A headline-driven news site encourages checking back frequently because the front page constantly changes. A feed reader collects what was published and holds it until you return.

The tradeoffs

Some sites publish only brief excerpts in their feeds to force readers to click through to the full article — for advertising purposes, primarily. A feed that shows only the first two sentences of each post is less pleasant than a full-text feed.

The more practical problem is accumulation. Subscribing to feeds is easy; the psychological weight of a growing unread count can eventually replicate the problem RSS was supposed to solve. A reader with four hundred unread items across forty subscriptions is not calmer than someone checking twenty websites — it has just added a number to the anxiety.

The response is to treat subscriptions the same way I treat bookshelves: periodically remove things that are no longer giving value. A small, current list of sources I actually read is more useful than a large list that represents aspiration rather than practice.

I do not know what shape web reading will take in five years. Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us and community aggregators like Digg are creating alternative ways to discover what is worth reading. RSS is one solution among several. For now it is the one that gives me the most control with the least noise.