Faithful followers of my blog may notice a new orange icon in the lower left corner. Labeled ‘XML’, it allows users to keep track of what’s going on at philisha.net at a glance without actually visiting the site in the web browser.

A little background first. Ever since the beginnings of the Internet, technology has been used to get more and more information piped to its users. The paradigm has always been to get as much input as possible. We are now reaping the effects of such immoderation—from spam to always-on IM clients to popup advertising, only recently have we started realizing information overload needs to be dealt with.

What we now need are tools to sift through data. That’s why Google is the most powerful company on the web in many respects. People are now far less concerned with how much information they have access to, and the shift is over to narrowing down the information.

RSS responds to this need by providing summaries of sites that get updated often. Instead of getting email updates for your favorite sites, you subscribe to their RSS feed and you choose when you want to check it. But instead of going to their site to see what’s new, you get a quick summary: all the recently posted articles with a snippet from the beginning of the text. Advanced RSS readers even show you which articles you’ve looked at and how many new stories each site you’re subscribed to has.

I’d say it’s worth looking into an RSS reader if you spend a lot of time browsing the web. It can save a lot of time by cutting back the fluff, and you have a lot more control over what you read. I’m looking forward to watching this technology catch on at more and more news sites and blogs.

I use Liferea on my FreeBSD desktop and it seems to work fine. For users of another operating system Feedreader would be worth looking at.