Tony: Sign Up For the New And Improved KC Confidential RSS Feed!!!

As this new website continues to come together, I’d like to tout one of my favorite new features that’s back in a big way.

Check out the new KC Confidential site feed and sign up for it on your favorite reader at this address: www.kcconfidential.com/rss

And now, allow me to explain why this is important:

First, let’s define terms.

Here’s how the world’s most accurate encyclopedia explains an RSS feed for the uninitiated:

"RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically."

Put simply, RSS provides a way to pick your favorite bits of content out of a website, blog or any other publishig operation without the pain in the ass of visiting the actual site and at your conveinience.

Contrary to the opinions of  non-web geeks, RSS actually drives traffic because it opens up your content and gets people curious about the next thing that’s going to happen.

For me, RSS allows me to scan everything I need to see on the web and put together content that proves you’re all racist. Also, the excerpted RSS model that KCC uses is just great for picking through all of the stories that I want to read here and offering a brief hint at what to expect when I click through.

Yeah, I know it’s rather "Web 2.0" to celebrate RSS but this feed is pulling content from all KCC sections and it’s part of the user centered web publishing model that a great many fans of newspapers have yet to figure out.

I’ll finish with a story . . . I was having a debate at a forum with a d-bag employed at The Star last year (Dave Helling) and (with a straight face) he claimed that the reason blogs would never replace newspapers (nobody ever said they would) was because a newspaper has all the City’s information in one convenient place and a reader would have to visit dozens if not hundreds of blogs for the same info. At that moment I had to chuckle because I knew that even in 2009, so many newspaper people were stuck in a time warp and hoping that the world would never change. This year I had an argument with that same douche and he had thankfully dropped that line. Instead he challenged everyone in the crowd to rely simply on blogs for all of their information about the world and then they would run back to their newspaper quickly.

I never got a chance to tell him that I’m certain once people find an RSS reader they like, they’ll never read the newspaper again.