Time for a little update. I've been wanting to write about this for awhile I couldn't quite organize my thought on what I am going about. Finally, I've decided to just fire it out and let it be.

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats:
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
RSS is a very powerful form web feed which allows user to receive constant update of a certain website. For more you detail RSS and its history, you can ask your 2 best friends, Google and Wikipedia, I'm sure they know much more than I do.

I've started using RSS for about half a year now and I found it extremely useful. Nowadays, there are just so many websites out there that provide you with various information on various topics. For instance just for daily news alone, you probably can find hundreds of websites already. Let just ignore them all and focus on reading the very famous ones only. Let's see we have BCC news, CNN news, Strait Times, if you are in Singapore, TIMES, Yahoo News, Google News, and Channel News Asia (There are more famous ones out there but these are the ones that I'm paying attention to most of the time). Man! that's 7 websites already! that's not it because I don't just read news. Today, it's an era of blog-crazed society, you most probably have a friend or two or more who have blogs. So yeah in order the catch up with my long distant friends, I also wanna read their blogs as well. Let's keep it simple and assume that I have 5 friends who regularly update their blogs. And just when I thought I was done, I remember that my favorite giant corporate also have their blogs, e.g. Google Lab, and oh yeah, my favorite Photoshop website, PSDTuts, and oh my favorite Flickr group also...eh... Facebook is also a big hype I better follow them as well... oh blah blah... Without doing the math, you can tell there are more than 10 websites to be visited daily. The messed up part is not every site updates daily. It's an extreme waste of effort and time to go over the list everyday just find that there is no updates or there is nothing I'm interested in reading. Imagine there is someone who'll do the job for you everyday and instantly archive every news updates and blog entries and deliver to you to indulge in your selective reading. Fabulous.

When you have your way so easy, you'll be compelled to start following more websites and exploit this free technological slave. RSS doesn't just give you the convience of having web updates instantly right where you want them to be (online/offline) but it also enables you to archive your favorite articles from different websites for futures uses. Furthermore, it allows you to conveniently cross reference articles as well.

To start using RSS, you can log onto any RSS reader website (e.g. blogline, iGoogle) for online mode. If you want to have it offline, you can download and install any software with RSS capibility and you're good to go. Currently, I'm using Thunderbird. It works the magic out for both RSS and my emails.