RSS Awareness Day
Apart from the May Day, some people suggested to make today also the "RSS Awareness Day"
If you don't know what "RSS" is and how to use it, this site does a much better explanation than I do. Have a read, I think you'll benefit from it.
It certainly benefited me. I subscribed tens of news sources and hundreds of blogs. It's just literally impossible to open each site and whether it has been updated.
Then the RSS come to rescure. Through an RSS reader, I can see all updates from all sites I subscribed in one place and only to read stuffs I'm interested in. If you subscribed an RSS document (we call it feed, which if you look up, you'll see a yellowish square icon at right hand end of your address bar) like mine, you don't even have to open my blog again - I output full text to my feed, so you can read them in your feed aggregator.
Most websites and blogs have that yellowish icon. If you click on it, you will get the RSS feed.
What I've found really surprising is that only 6% of world's internet users use RSS. I think the major barrier of introducing RSS to more people is that the whole thing is still bit too complex for some people (especially for those who type www.google.aol in their address bar), they don't understand how HTML works but they know how to visit a website. Well that's good enough for ordinary people, isn't it?
The same should apply to RSS. People don't have to know what RSS stands for, they don't have to know how it works, the only thing they need to know, is how to use it, in the simplest way, which requires quite an effort from major websites and communties and still has a long way to go.
