By Frank Bajak The Associated Press
Saturday, February 28, 2004; 3:57 PM
NEW YORK -- E-mail is crippled, concussed by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding, a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads.
And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.
Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.
The technology behind them is called RSS and I rely on it daily to consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen other Web sites that employ RSS to make the very latest news stories or bits of commentary available for the plucking.
Aided by software on my computer that goes out and retrieves my feeds, I swiftly sort through headlines and summaries. By clicking on included hyperlinks, I can visit originating sites for more detail.
"For an average Internet user who regularly visits about 50 Web sites, rather than have to go visit those 50 sites wouldn't it be cool if those sites could somehow visit you? And not only that, but if they could also tell you when they've changed?" said Greg Reinacker, head of NewsGator, which sells an add-on for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client that offers one leading way to read feeds.
Hundreds of thousands of Web feeds are available, spurred by the popularity of Web logs, which account for their bulk. One site that has been sorting feeds since 2001, Syndicat8.com, added 7,326 in January - its biggest monthly jump - to its collection of more than 53,000 information streams.
Some of that upsurge was election year fever as Democratic presidential candidates led by Howard Dean daily turned on the RSS spigot to "broadcast" to supporters.
But Web feeds are no Howard-come-lately. Info generators of all kinds - big media, government and non-profits alike - are embracing them.
Disney leverages the technology to deliver video clips for ESPN.com and ABCNews.com. Apple's iTunes generates a feed to alert subscribers to its latest sounds.
