RSS - How it changed my life

Yesterday I blogged about RSS basics... essentially writing about what RSS and News Readers are. Today I want to tell you how RSS has changed my life and how it might change yours if it hasn't already.

First thing you should know about me is that I am an information junkie. I like to be know exactly what is going on in the industries that interest me, and therefore I used to have to visit about 10 - 15 websites a day along with 10 - 15 blogs a day to stay on top of the tech world. After getting familiar with RSS and using a News Reader, I visit 2 - 3 sites a day for news and have the rest delivered to me!

So what is the big deal? Here is the big deal:

1) I now spend 1 - 2 hours READING new material, rather than looking to try and figure out what is new on a site.
2) I have found great new sources of information. I now have about 30 news feeds that I aggregate and read, as opposed to the 10 - 15 I used to read.
3) I get all this information stored offline so I can read it at any time. For example, I was on a flight from California back to Boston and I was able to catch up on all my news despite being offline.

Ok... now for some drawbacks:
1) If you take 1 day off from reading your news, you will quickly feel like you are WAY BEHIND in your life. For example, I took maybe 2 days off and I came home to over 400 new pieces of news to filter through... that took some time.

So now you see how RSS is used now... but think about all the practical applications in the future. This architecture is a simple way for consumers to subscribe to digital data. So lets say you are a bio-tech researcher interested in a particular gene. You could subscribe to a feed around all the publications that mention that gene. Now imagine that you a cancer patient, and want to be kept up-to-date on all the latest alternative treatments, RSS and a news reader could take care of that for you.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that this is really a simple publish and subscribe architecture, but the ability to efficiently aggregate digital data (news, music, video, etc.) in an automated fashion could really help make our lives easier.