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Google News Now Providing RSS and Atom Feeds
Avery writes "Several sites are reporting that Google has announced in their blog today that they will provide RSS and Atom feeds in their news section. Previously the only way to get RSS/Atom feeds from Google news was through third party scrapers. Now, you can get feeds for any of Google's news areas as well as feeds for a news search. (The news search is basically the same concept as Google news alerts, only in RSS.)"
Yahoo news , my.yahoo.com , search and alerts .. have all been RSS for quite some time.
/. banned my.yahoo).
I can imagine the irony of reading google news on my.yahoo.com (too bad
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On my HTPC, I pull RSS feeds of news and sports scores each night. It gives me a quick and easy way to get the daily headlines all in one spot. Same as people who use aggregators... it's all about convenience.
Your bandwidth example is faulty. First of all, most people don't have their aggregators set to update every 5 minutes. Second, if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, you'd know that content takes very little bandwidth compared to images and markup code. Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute. For a popular site, the processing savings would be significant.
PDA applications are a great example of RSS put to good use. Sure, you have to connect to read the full content, but the headlines are presented in a simple manner that even crappy PDAs can handle. Far better than downloading ALL of the content on a site, or requiring a constant connection to the Internet.
There's MANY niche environments that RSS feeds are perfectly suited for. They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client. Why NOT have them around?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I have failed to see the point of RSS.
I don't know what the "official point" of it is, but I have a great many uses for it. One main use I have is I have several feeds on my homepage and I can at a glance see if they've updated and/or see if I might be interested in their update.
Another use for it is to open up one program and it will tell me if any blogs I read (and there are many that I do) have updated since I last checked. Instead of having to open up over 20 pages (most of which remain unupdated for months at a time), I just open up "one page".
Another use is I keep track of new e-books on this site and I'll keep the items in my reader. Once a week or so, I go through all the items, delete most of them, keep the items for books that sound interesting*. That way whenever I want to buy a book, I can just open up my client and look through the items I've saved (which are obvious as they're unread).
* Actually I lie. I put the ones that sound interesting in a relational database. But you don't HAVE to do that, I'm just anal like that. Well, that and trying to keep track of my free e-books is very, very difficult.
One word: Live Bookmarks.
Clik the orange blob in the bottom right, subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed, and drop it in your bookmarks (or on your toolbar). No need to visit slashdot to see if there's any interesting stories, as they'll be in your bookmarks.
I do the same with BBC News too, I can get an idea of what's happening by simply dropping down a list and checking the headlines. If a story grabs my attention I click it and go straight to the story - no need to navigate the horrendus news.bbc.co.uk site (fine for the top 5-10 stories, but after that it's easy to miss stuff)
Google does not tell Firefox it has a feed, here is how to add it (ripped from the mozilla site):
Some sites don't tell Firefox that they support Live Bookmarks, even though they actually do. If you know the URL of a site's RSS feed (url ends with
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