Sports Calendar

Sophie is in her first year at university. She can’t imagine a world without the internet. Her uptake of new technologies is instinctive, and RSS is integral to how she approaches the net. She loves her Mac laptop, and her newsreader is NetNewsWire. She turns to www.newsisfree.com/sources/bycat for quick access to information (BBC News, television headlines from Digital Spy, health news from Reuters and gossip from Ananova, as well as CNN and No 10). She also subscribes to feeds from her friends’ web logs and they subscribe to the feed from hers (which she made using www.myrsscreator.com). This is not a way of sharing private thoughts, but of co-ordinating diaries. Sophie chose www.flickr.com to host her online photo album because it has an RSS feed, so her family and friends know when a new picture has been posted. Her latest joy is podcasting (downloading and recording internet radio): she learnt about it at www.podcastalley.com, downloaded iPodder from www.ipodder.net and updates her radio show, Sophie’s Sensible Collection of Tunes, almost every day. She doesn’t think about RSS at all.

EARLY ADOPTER

Ken Russell, 46, accountant

Ken works on computers all day and sees himself as an early adopter. While he lacks his daughter’s techie intuition, he did not find RSS difficult to pick up. Following the advice at the BBC’s RSS page, he downloaded FeedDemon (£16 from www.bradsoft.com), which is recommended by resident Doors expert David Hewson. A nifty “newspaper” facility takes Ken’s favourite feeds in a particular category — news or sport, say — and lays them out in a simple, configurable scheme of headlines with a text summary underneath. The newsreader does exactly what it says on the tin. Ken selected his feeds from www.syndic8.com. These include the usual solid news sources for share prices and financial comment, as well as Accountancy Age and sports updates from the Arsenal Times and Cricinfo. By the time he has scanned articles at The Economist (to which he happily subscribes), The New Yorker and the fabulously eclectic Arts & Letters Daily, he feels extremely well informed — and quickly.

SILVER SURFER

Ruby Russell, 74, grandmother

Ken’s mother, who lives in Edinburgh, is one of thousands who have painstakingly discovered the joys of e-mail and the web in order to keep in touch with their families. She does not want to learn any more about computers, so one of her favourite bookmarks is My Yahoo! (my.yahoo.com), which simplifies RSS. Her granddaughter, Sophie, helped personalise her page so that it collects news from the BBC (Scottish news and links to Radio 4 interviews), as well as Sophie’s web log and photos, which Ruby pretends to be shocked by, but shows to all her friends. Adding new feeds is just like using a search engine — simply search for a keyword, then click “Add” — so she can now go straight to Cold Climate Gardening tips. Ruby’s only complaint is that most of the genealogy sites with feeds are American, but she has still found a wealth of information.

GETTING STARTED WITH RSS

The simplest way to enjoy RSS feeds is to bookmark a website that acts as a reader, such as my.yahoo.com or www.feedster.com. The advantages of a newsreader program are that it archives the headlines you have viewed and can be personalised more easily. The BBC offers an excellent introduction at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/rss/ 3223484.stm, which links to a number of good readers. Once you have downloaded a reader, you will need to add feeds. This is a matter of finding feed addresses (similar to web addresses) and copying them into your reader. You can locate addresses by going to a favourite site, looking for a small orange button marked RSS or XML and clicking on it; alternatively, visit a site that collects feed addresses, such as www.syndic8.com and www.newsisfree.com. As RSS gives access to all the perils of the web, don’t be surprised if it leads to rudeness. At least with RSS, you can turn it off.