Information Access

Today I have received an email from Ivan, a Master New Media visitor who wanted to subscribe to Robin Good's News.

He told me he had clicked on one of the little orange buttons containing the letters "XML" which are now distributed all over the Web site. Then a new page full of code opened up and Ivan felt completely lost.

He did not know how he could subscribe to Robin Good's News on this page.

Here is what I wrote back to Ivan in an attempt to make it clear and easy for him what to do to receive the Robin Good news without coming back to the site every day:

Ivan, you need two things:

1) a news aggregator/reader and

2) the URLs of Robin Good's RSS News Feeds.

A news aggregator is an application that gathers and displays interesting news for you. You can tell the aggregator where to collect the news by providing it with the Web addresses (URLs) of RSS News Feeds that you want to subscribe to.

An RSS News Feed is a certain type of XML document that contains information about news on selected Web sources in a language that the aggregator can understand (but you do not need to understand). On Robin Good's site you can see those RSS feeds when you click on the little orange buttons, containing the writing "XML". (The URL of a feed appears then in the address field of your browser.)

To subscribe to Robin Good's News simply do the following:

1) Download a newsreader from the Web.

Here are three possible free solutions:
FeedReader http://feedreader.com/
AmphetaDesk http://www.disobey.com/ amphetadesk/
NewsCrawler http://www.newzcrawler.com
or go to CNet Download.com "Newsreaders" section and find over 90 of them there:
http://download.com.com/ 3150-2164-0.html?tag=stbc.gp

2) Install the news aggregator on your computer

3) Insert the URL of the News Feed you want to subscribe to (e.g. the Seach and Research Feed)

How exactly you can insert an URL depends on your aggregator.
If you use, for example, NewzCrawler, you do the following:
a) Select "Channel" from the menu bar
b) Select "New"
c) Select "New Newsfeed Channel"
d) Check the option "Enter Newsfeed Channel URL"
e) Enter the URL
f) select a folder inside Newzcrawler where you want to put your feed (you can define folders like in Windows, e.g. you could create a folder called "New Media")
g) click "Finish".

Now NewzCrawler provides you with excerpts from Robin Good's latest articles and with links to the full articles. You can choose yourself how often you want your newsreader to check your selected news sources for new items.

If you want to know how you can create your own news feeds, read Robin Good's article on How To Syndicate Web Site News Through RSS Feeds Technology.