As someone who has a nominal presence in the media, I try to find out about people's attitudes towards it. One common thing is that, for understandable reasons, people dress with the volume and composition of the media.
This fatigue comes from some compounding factors. There is a strong belief that the role of information presented by the media is distorted by high-polarizing players.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans with partisan affiliations believe that news media reporting is "a very biased presence" that is "a big problem" in our media, a 2018 poll found.
Media users are concerned about how the invisible handiness of algorithms affects the content they see.
Nearly half of consumers don't know how Facebook's newsfeed is selected, and a quarter of Americans fear that Google is giving dangerously false information.
With these dreadful doubts about the credibility of the media, consumers must endure the usual exhaustion of consistent and balanced media intake. Anyone who takes the time to check out a collection of balanced and trusted news organizations should check their sites or applications regularly.
All this being said, and with the added pressure of having to be professionally knowledgeable, I am able to keep all the publications that I don't believe in burning. I attribute this ability to turn media saturation into an old web tool - RSS.
Since I am indebted to this simple but powerful tool, media consumption is so good, so many people are so upset, I thought now might be the right time to put it forward as a viable option. What is my pitch for switching to RSS.
Elegant web tool for a more civilized age
Since you'll be forgiven for what RSS is, let's start there.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has stood by a few different names over the years, but the purpose and underlying technology have remained relatively stable.
In fact, the "RDF Site Summary" was created by the RSS programmers in Netscape as a data structure for regularly updated web content repositories, such as the respected elders of the Web. In particular, it is intended to be used in "My Netscape", a kind of customized browser home page (when they are a thing).
When Netscape left the project, the two competing teams picked up the mantle and went their separate ways. By the time RSS 2.0 came out, it had been renamed "Really Simple Syndication", a group copyrighted and used the Open Web Standard.
In short, RSS is a special type of XML. In general, XML takes the same syntax of HTML, group opening, and closing tags, and more generally towards structured data. Therefore, XML can be used to represent a wide spectrum of data formats.
The simple structure of RSS allows users to identify, manage, and display streamlined web content in practically any format. In RSS, every source of web content is packed into a "feed" - a complete RSS document file, which needs to display all the RSS information.
The simple structure of RSS allows users to identify, manage and display streamlined web content in practically any format. In RSS, every source of web content is packed into a "feed" - a complete RSS document file, which needs to display all the RSS information.
The data in the feed (mostly about the source of the content) after the section, such as the title, is combined with each published piece within the tag. Each tag contains sub-tags for title, description, publication date and other information, all declared as XML angle-bracket tags.
As a cousin of persistent structured XML, RSS is serialized in its original form, which can be easily understood by programs and read by humans (you need to be annoyed).
Most of the time, however, consumers are fed by an RSS aggregator, sometimes called an "RSS reader". When launched, these programs download updated copies of each source's respective feed file, as feed publishers only add new content to the end of their RSS files. This program reads, ides, and displays all of the user's feeds in some way.
Parsing all RSS feeds, and this process repeats them in many ways, where magic happens. Aggregators get their names from all default feeds in their default mode, ordering all the feeds of all feeds by order of date and time of publication. However, aggregators can do more than that. Users can feed by simple theme so that all items from the group feed are displayed in chronological order.
Extra-High Points (UN)
So what really sets RSS aggregators apart from using content?
First of all, by using RSS you can only track the feeds you told him, nothing more. Once you add the RSS feed to all the resources you need, you're all set - your reader will post all of those sources.
Even better, practically any source on the web can be placed in the feed. You can get RSS feeds to deliver videos, podcasts, and profiles on some social networks. If your favorite web content creator doesn't provide an RSS feed, there are services that can generate RSS feeds from it.
Second, RSS aggregators give you the power to consume the content you want. If you want to view each source individually, you can do so. You can stream your content if you want, or you can top the group and have special collections for news, technology, art, and culture, or whatever company is most comfortable for you.
My favorite RSS aggregator feature is unread item tracking. Because it keeps track of what you review and what you don't, you can easily tell if you get into your content.
In short, an RSS reader refers to your content as "read" or "unread". Everything that your feeder has published since the last publication of your reader is unread content, and when you close your reader the last one is left unread.
Most RSS aggregators put this feature in the front and center, as users usually appreciate seeing something new. Reading material can also be accessed, but they are usually open to newcomers. As soon as you find what you read, it will be removed from the site. Depending on how your reader is configured, it may be removed from your device or placed in a cache containing the X number of recently read objects and cleaned up.
If you set up your RSS reader to check your feeds in the background and enable notifications, you can get a ping when new content arrives. Not all feed readers alert you to notifications. Instead, most of them only check and load when you open it, which I like.
However, if you like your content minute by minute, some readers will issue push notifications. For those who don't, you can rig other services and remove yourself to take the baton from your RSS aggregator.
Live the old web way
As simple as these features are, they add a massive change to your media experience.
While RSS is not the only way, the most effective way to utilize your chosen media resources is not the big players on the web. Unlike Facebook and Google, RSS does not push your content through an algorithm to determine what you see.
Instead, your feed publishes the sources you choose. Unless the sources you choose are biased (or if they overlap each other's biases) then your news will be balanced. RSS ensures that you get everything you need to publish your sources so you don't miss anything. When content is published, it looks unreadable - if you never check your reader, you'll miss it.
On top of that, RSS is great for imposing "component control" on your media protocol. Your reader will automatically hide what you read, take the time to read anything from the unexpected drowning that you have never read before, and remember everything you read. This is a much bigger benefit than most news apps, displaying all of their recent stories and leaving you to check out what's up.
By extension, RSS does not track what you read. That way, if you see something unread, you know it's new. Even better, your reader will remember all your unread material, no matter how long it is. No matter how many times you open the app, how much time has passed, or how many new items are stacked on top of it, if you don't read it, it won't read.
Here's the part that really comes down to control: After you've read all the stuff you haven't read, you're done. Your reader will not load much content because there is nothing to load. You can close your app and find that there's nothing to read, and it will tell you when you open the app later and something new happens.
Lastly, RSS allows you to keep all your media in one place, which limits many benefits. One, it simultaneously streamlines and deepens how you experience content. With the same reader app for all of your resources, you avoid the stress of opening multiple apps one by one and navigating their different layouts.
However, just because your feeds are all in one place doesn't mean you have to dig through a heap. You are free to handle them, but it makes sense to you. By grouping the same feed together, all the contents of the feed in the same group are shown in chronological order. With this plan, you can view content from different sources on the same topic or event.
If this isn't enough to win you over, consider this: You also get a serious information security update from RSS. Because your content is all in one place, you rely on a single app that has access to your device.
RSS readers are also very simple pieces of software, so they are smaller than many features that provide great content. An RSS reader is just an XML reformer, much less its developer.
Feed the Content Beast
Based on the Open Standard, RSS offers a number of experiences. This fact is interesting but I don't know where to start. While I encourage you to explore the gift of options for yourself, here are some tips about diving.
One, find out what devices you want your aggregator to find, and find service on all of them. Maintaining conflicting heights of unread content quickly becomes exhausting. There are plenty of free services that offer the cloud sync and multi-platform client offerings you need.
Two, find out where to get an RSS feed for your content. Some synchronization services allow you to search feeds for thousands of sources so that your content is covered more often. For more vague sources, you may need to do some digging.
Start by looking at the main and menu pages of your online source, as it may have a little radio wave icon or a page (as we did here) linking to its RSS feed. If you're stumped, you can use a Google search trick to scan the site for feeds. By searching for "Site: URL RSS" - without citations and with the URL of your source - you get hits from a site that has "RSS".
If all else fails, you can try creating a feed from your favorite web content. There are services that try to read the site's HTML and convert it to RSS. Of course, your mileage may vary, but you don't have to resort to this step.
In fact, there's not much of it: find the reader, find the feed, add it to the reader, and start viewing the content. In fact, the same RSS setup I did before learning anything about technology was easy for me. So for those of you who take advantage of this, I hope that RSS gives you the same kind of awareness about your media consumption.
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