RSS demystified by Howard Rheingold

Last week, I gave an informal brown bag session at work on how to use Google Reader to track information flows. I'm trying to convert folks here into leveraging RSS feeds to keep on top of things instead of our old-school ways of browsing sites checking to see if things have been updated.

I started off the session with Lee LeFever's CommonCraft show on RSS in Plain Text. And then I went on to demo Google Reader and how it worked and the advantages of sharing feeds and collaborative filtering, etc.

In hindsight, I didn't do a very good job of it. Sure, they learned a little, but not all I'd hoped.

And my assessment of my effectiveness was driven home yet again when I watched Howard Rheingold's recent vlog post: Introduction to RSS. He's a great teacher, and I can learn a lot from paying attention to the little things he does so well.

For one, Howard's setup of the problem is great:

Information is abundant.
Access to information is infinitely easy
Way-finding requires skill

Finding the information that matters and knowing why it matters in the unordered flow is probably the most important task and skill in my life.

Howard starts the hunting and gathering part of in his day by reading blogs (many, many blogs) as the first level of his filtering the "unordered flow." And how he keeps up with 100s of blogs for this first level of filtering? via RSS.

Then Howard delivers the solution with a comprehensive walk through of how he uses Bloglines to track his RSS feeds.

Go watch Howard's vlog on RSS now. Your investing seven and a half minutes watching it now will be repaid handsomely as you cut down your time spent browsing and instead let the info flow to you.