RSS is your secret weapon to acing your research for any type of project. RSS readers are made with the idea of managing large volumes of written text in mind, so they’re the perfect companion to students, journalists, writers and professionals who are prepping for a big presentation.
I will show you how, but in case you’re drawing a blank at the mention of RSS – a short breakdown of what you need to know!
What is RSS?
Glad you asked. RSS is an old-school Internet protocol that’s as old as the Internet itself – at least the commercial Internet service. Early developers recognized that now that more people had access to the Internet, they’d create more websites and the task of keeping up with these sites would be hard.
As a result, RSS or Really Simple Syndication was born. It keeps all your favorite sites together in a single place and makes the online reading experience all the easier.
How does it work?
The whole process is simple and it takes no more than a click. You choose whatever RSS reader you think is best (there are so many out there right now) and start adding feeds to the subscriptions list. The process is more than intuitive with many readers right now making it easy to search for feeds directly in their databases, which is a lot better than having to look for an RSS feed on the website first.
In the past this used to be a lot easier to do. Today that’s not the case. Inoreader even has a Chrome extension, whose best feature is detecting feeds on any site and then subscribing to them outright. Once you have the feed in your subscriptions, the RSS feed reader will pull up new posts as soon as they’re published and display them in chronological order on the main dashboard.
From here on out, it’s up to you how you customize the experience.
Is it useful?
WIRED has said on more than one occasion that RSS feed readers are going through a Renaissance at the moment. The main reason for this is how much readers invest in the development of features that broaden for what RSS feed readers can be used in the first place.
More and more digital businesses are finding RSS readers suitable for certain tasks regarding brand monitoring, social media listening, market research, and even team-related projects. It all depends on the specific RSS reader you select and how much you’re able to pay, but as a whole, it’s not a large investment overall.
How can it help with your research?
Provides relevant information
No matter what research you perform, the abundance of information is one of the key obstacles – editing down and selecting the right content is tough without a little help. RSS feed readers help you manage the sources with frequent posting schedules by reducing the unwanted headlines in your dashboard.
Most often you can directly subscribe to a specific topic or keyword if the website is on WordPress but that’s not often the case. Here is where RSS feed readers come in to help along with content filters. Receive or exclude content based on keywords and phrases.
Similar pages and articles to what you read
Content discovery is quite important for RSS feed readers. You get more and more readers with a penchant for recommending articles whether it’s socially (The Old Reader promotes the articles with the most views and interactions) or through an algorithm (Inoreader) or simply by designating a discovery zone (Inoreader and Feedly).
Inoreader has a lot of features that help you discover useful sources relevant to your research. One of the passive features is the ‘feeds you might like’ that pops up at random times. Another feature gives control to you. Right click on the feed you find most useful and then click ‘more like this’. You will find out the best possible suggestions.
Trusted sources
Although a good researcher knows how to distinguish a trustworthy source from a misleading one, the whole process slows things down considerably.
RSS feed readers come with a built-in database of all the RSS feeds its users have added over the years, so whenever you encounter a recommended feed or perform a search you will find sources that many people trust overall. Inoreader has one of the best internal searches, which goes beyond just your subscriptions. That’s where the real value is.
You have everything in one place
RSS became popular for this unique feature. You don’t go to your sources. Your sources come to you. From every corner of the Internet. It’s a feature designed to cope with the volume of content that began being produced once the Internet became a more widespread service.
Add your favorite sites together so you don’t lose time visiting them individually. An added bonus is that you don’t forget a source either, which is a frequent occurrence. You might scoff and point to the good, old bookmarks as a way to keep all you reading together, but that’s ineffective. You still have to go through the process of individually visiting each site to check for new posts.
What about newsletters? Or social media accounts? Or podcasts? Or videos? You get the idea.
Provides only the things you need
No distractions.
That’s the final promise RSS makes. It’s a better system for organizing your sources, because it’s a living, breathing document. Incredibly useful when it comes to researching an ongoing story and you have to rely on news sources with continuous updates.
RSS feed readers are perfectly adept at supporting social media platforms. It varies from reader to reader. Inoreader, for instance, is made to partner up with Twitter seamlessly so you can isolate the accounts, threads, and hashtags that work best for your purposes. By having everything in just a single folder, you’re bypassing any distractions online – and it’s so easy to get distracted from the task at hand.