TODAY: TODAY hacked, it’s on your phone

‘Hack­ers’ use RSS to sati­ate their appetites for news-on-demand

I’VE writ­ten about RSS feeds and how blog­gers use them to “syn­di­cate” their con­tent for read­ers, who don’t have to actu­ally visit their sites to get their updates.

I’d attempt to explain RSS (which stands for Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion), but I think it’s bet­ter left to ency­clopae­dias such as the online Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org).

What I know about RSS is that it sum­marises all my favourite blogs and news sites’ lat­est offer­ings, which I am then able to read on what is called an “aggre­ga­tor”, such as bloglines.com.

Why am I re-visiting the topic of RSS? Well, I found out recently that some smart under­grad­u­ate had “hacked” into (or mod­i­fied) the online edi­tion of this news­pa­per and turned it into an RSS feed.

Read more at TODAY­on­line: [pdf]

Tech­no­rati Tags: RSS, sin­ga­pore, TODAY

This means neti­zens who know how to use RSS feeds no longer have to visit the TODAY web­site (www.todayonline.com) to get their daily dose of the nation’s favourite newspaper.

Most free blog­ging ser­vices, such as blogger.com and wordpress.com, come with built-in RSS gen­er­a­tors, which cre­ate webfeeds for peo­ple to sub­scribe to their con­tent for free.

These updates are auto­mat­i­cally down­loaded by read­ers to read at their leisure, either at their com­put­ers or their mobile devices (mobile phones are increas­ingly being used to read syn­di­cated feeds).

The under­grad­u­ate who cre­ated the RSS feed for TODAY, Chua U-Zyn (www.uzyn.com), a com­puter engi­neer­ing under­grad­u­ate, explained that he did so because he had some dif­fi­culty read­ing the newspaper’s online offer­ings when he was on the move.

Sure, today­on­line offers sub­scribers free email news alerts, but the sum­maries were not good enough for U-Zyn, which prompted him to sit down and cre­ate the feed “since I think it ben­e­fits me and might also ben­e­fit some other peo­ple who, like me, have a prob­lem grab­bing a phys­i­cal copy of TODAY every morning”.

While I’m prob­a­bly never going to know how U-Zyn coded the feed for this news­pa­per, some read­ers are thank­ful he did.

“Although I get the print ver­sion at the office, once I’m at work, I’m too busy. The full RSS feed before I get in is ideal!”, wrote “Otter­man” (blog.sivasothi.com) in the com­ments sec­tion of U-Zyn’s blog post announc­ing the mak­ing of the feed.

“Sub­scrib­ing to their email update was too painful for the eyes to parse through the loooooooooooooong email,” he also said.

The feed makes every­thing more user friendly, added “bingx­iong” (bingxiong.blogsome.com).

While TODAY’s sign-up process for the email news alert updates is sim­ple enough and gives read­ers the options of either full text of news arti­cles or hyper­text links deliv­ered to their email inboxes, it seems that read­ing RSS feeds is the way for­ward for some neti­zens, espe­cially those accus­tomed to read­ing many sites at a go.

For myself, util­is­ing RSS feeds allows me to speed-read up to 300 blogs and news sites a day with­out actu­ally vis­it­ing any of these sites.

It’s come to a point where RSS feeds have become so much the norm, that for some of us neti­zens, a blog isn’t a blog unless it’s got an
RSS feed built in. This is whether or not you’ve invested $2 mil­lion in a colour­ful web­site for the blog, and are giv­ing away cars as prizes.

These days, most news agen­cies such as the BBC (bbc.co.uk), CNN (cnn.com) and Chan­nel NewsA­sia (channelnewsasia.com) have RSS feeds built into their web­sites, under­lin­ing the impor­tance of this par­tic­u­lar Web tool.

Some of these news sites even have sep­a­rate feeds for dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of news, such as sports and enter­tain­ment. But I can under­stand why some web­sites aren’t quick enough to adopt RSS as a means of dis­trib­ut­ing their content.

Com­mer­cial inter­ests dic­tate that eye­balls are required at their sites so adver­tis­ers get their money’s worth. As a result, web­mas­ters tend to be pre­oc­cu­pied with try­ing to merely drive traf­fic to their sites.

Here’s some­thing for web­mas­ters to note: You can insert adver­tise­ments within RSS feeds. Fur­ther­more, it is the con­tents of a web­site — more than any colour­ful lay­out — that attracts read­ers and makes them want to get hold of the site’s con­tent as eas­ily as possible.

And it is telling that this is prob­a­bly the only local news­pa­per whose online ver­sion has been “hacked” so that read­ers can get hold of arti­cles more conveniently.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over two years, and can’t wait for the day tech­nol­ogy allows him to actu­ally com­pre­hend all of the 300-plus arti­cles a day he reads via RSS feeds.