I've been following the RSS space for some time, and I'm starting to get the feeling that it really could have a significant impact on how we all access and receive information from online sources. It has definitely had a big impact on me when it comes to how I get my information, but the more interesting impact has been where I get my information.

Before I discovered RSS, like most internet new junkies, I would have a list of sites that I would review as part of a daily routine. I would also sign up for email newsletters to ensure that I didn't miss any important news items or reviews about the latest gadgets. This is manageable if you track a few sources, but it becomes quickly unmanageable if you start tracking more than 5 sources. The net result for me was that I would whittle my sources down to a few mainstream sources with trusted editorial staff. I guess this is why the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times still stay in business despite the plethora of finance sites and online news sources.

When I first started using RSS aggregators such as NewsIsFree and RSS newsreaders such as FeedDemon, I started out by subscribing to my standard list of information sources. This certainly made things convenient because I could quickly glance through the headlines, filter out uninteresting news items, and then jump directly to articles. I could also easily and quickly determine which sources had new articles and which articles were new articles that I had not read. In fact, it reminded me of USENET newsgroups, before they became the dumping grounds for spam. It really made you feel like the internet was a vibrant community of active and diverse information publishers instead of remote and isolated enclaves of information sources. I guess the analogy is like being in a vibrant city like New York where it's easy to find diverse restaurants which are always open, versus moving to a new suburb where you have to know where the restaurants are, figure out how to get there, and then drive there to see if they're open.

RSS aggregators certainly made my life more convenient, but the real interesting change for me is how much easier it is to track a wider variety of information sources, especially blogs. I used to track well known blogs such as slashdot.org and techdirt.com, but with the convenience of RSS, I now track smaller blogs such as Tim Oren's Due Diligence blog, as well as Clary Shirky's blog. Being able to track multiple blogs quickly and efficiently has definitely been an eye-opening experience for me and it's worth discussing in another blog entry. Without RSS, this is something that I would never do because checking blogs that update on an irregular and infrequent schedule is just too time consuming.

The more I use RSS, both as a consumer and publisher, the more I feel that it's really the beginning of the "new new thing". RSS alone is just a spec (well, many specs, but it should be easy enough to consolidate into one), but I think the ease with which you can publish and consume structured and tagged information from multiple sources without incurring significant startup costs and ongoing costs is really going to change the rules of the game for content on the internet. It's still early to say who or what will emerge as winners, but it's definitely going to be big IMHO.