New service delivers Web content to you

By Frank Baiak
Associated Press

•	Trying RSS For an introduction to RSS, my.yahoo.com offers a dumbed-down beta version. Web-based aggregators including fastbuzz.com and bloglines.com are popular because there's no software to download — and they're free. FeedDemon, a downloadable cross between an e-mail client and a Web browser, is feature-packed and costs $30. NetNewsWire for the Mac, also a download, costs $40.

And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.

Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.

The technology behind them is called RSS, and I rely on it daily to consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen other Web sites that employ RSS to make the latest news bits available for the plucking.

Aided by software on my computer that goes out and retrieves my feeds, I swiftly sort through headlines and summaries. By clicking on included hyperlinks, I can visit originating sites for more detail.

"For an average Internet user who regularly visits about 50 Web sites, rather than have to go visit those 50 sites wouldn't it be cool if those sites could somehow visit you? And not only that, but if they could also tell you when they've changed?" said Greg Reinacker, head of NewsGator, which sells an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers one way to read feeds.

Hundreds of thousands of Web feeds are available, spurred by the popularity of Web logs, which account for their bulk. One site that has been sorting feeds since 2001, Syndic8.com, added 7,326 in January — its biggest monthly jump — to its collection of more than 53,000 information streams.

Some of that upsurge was election year fever as Democratic presidential candidates led by Howard Dean daily turned on the RSS spigot to "broadcast" to supporters.

Info generators of all kinds — big media, government and nonprofits alike — are embracing them.

Disney leverages the technology to deliver video clips for ESPN.com and ABCNews.com. Apple's iTunes generates a feed to alert subscribers to its latest sounds.

If it lives on the Web, it can be brought to your desktop — or even to your wireless device.

RSS has been called the TiVo of the Web, the first "killer app" of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web's second-generation XML standard.

But the writing is on the wall. And it's not graffiti; the feeds are spam-free — though advertising may eventually be added to some.

Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system.

Yahoo's new search engine trolls RSS feeds in addition to Web pages. And a company called Feedster.com is trying to build a business around customizing searches of 500,000 feeds — and then delivering you the search results in a single feed.

RSS feeds vary in length and capability. Feeds can be simple, spare text or bold and multimedia-flashy.

And that's what makes them both exciting and frustrating.

It's not simple for the non-techie to configure RSS. If they're obvious on a Web page, the feeds generally are offered as orange buttons that read "XML" or "RSS." There's no uniformity to feeds, though the best include a good headline and a succinct summary. You can choose to have feeds delivered to your desktop or gathered by a Web-based service.