Before I dig into some of the more obscure uses of RSS (in a future post), I figured I’d list out all sorts of creative ways RSS can be used beyond news headlines and blogs. Here goes:
- Track Specific News Headlines. You can keep track of news on particular topics by subscribing to specific news search results. Here’s a constantly updated news search on the Seattle Seahawks via Google. Here’s another by Yahoo! that tracks the headlines coming in on the U.S. Supreme Court. To subscribe, just do your search and find the RSS feed link.
- Find Shopping Deals. Another cool use of RSS is the ability to get entries when a shopping deal or coupon comes along. Slickdeals (feed), Ben’s Bargains (feed) and MoreStuff4Less (feed) are just a few of the feeds out there.
- Track Packages. Nobody enjoys visiting a site and punching in a tracking number just to get shipment status on a package. Simpletracking.com allows you to create a custom feed that gets updated as your package moves along its route. UPS, Fedex, USPS & DHL are supported.
- Create a Calendar Feed. This is a cool way to share events with others. RSSCalendar.com allows you to create an account, add events and meetngs, and then share a feed for others to consume. They can use a standard feed reader or the RSSCalendar.com site to keep track.
- TV Listings Via RSS. Track programming on your favorite TV channels via Bootleg RSS.
- Track Weather. Get weather updates via RSSWeather. Here’s the weather in New York City as of this posting.
- Keep Up With Specific Emails Via RSS. Mailbucket will pump any emails into a feed that you forward to slurp@mailbucket.org. Just create an Outlook rule against whatever (e.g. emails from particular senders) and get the sent out to a feed once they come in. Just keep in mind that such feeds are unencrypted and can be consumed by others.
- Get Some General Knowledge On A Regular Basis. Not that you need it, but you can enrich your mind and impress people at cocktail parties by subscribing to daily feeds that send along a Word Of The Day (via Wordsmith.org), Quote of the Day (via Brainy Quote), or how about a bit of wisdom with a daily fortune cookie?
- Follow Your Favorite Comics. Tapestry Comics keeps track of a whole bunch of RSS feeds including Dilbert and Peanuts.
- Sports Team RSS Feeds. Follow the goings-on of your favorite sports team. Yahoo! delivers feeds for professional baseball, football, hockey and basketball.
- Deliver Your Contacts Via RSS. If you need to keep track of your contacts on different machines or want to share your contacts with friends, RSSContact.com allows you to create a feed and upload your contact information to do just that.
- Get Notified On Travel Deals. Looking to pounce on a good deal to a particular destination? Get notified on deals to particular cities. Travelocity let’s you build your own custom feed for tracking. Orbitz tracks a whole bunch of feeds to a many cities.
There’s still other stuff out there. These are just a few of the ways RSS can do more than news headlines. Just about all of the above are compatible with your favorite news reader or portal site (like My Yahoo!, Google’s personalized page or Netvibes). Enjoy!
Update: A follow-up, second article on taking RSS beyond headlines has been published here.
And, finally, track any specific part of any web page via http://feed43.com
:)
I’d also like to see
1. My bank account on RSS
2. My Bills paid list on RSS, offered my one bill paying company
3. My car needs a webserver and RSS, so I can fetch a running list of all problems it might have. ( Gas levels, oil change needed )
As for shopping for deals, dealnews.com is an awesome site for that.
I also like having quotes to read everyday, and have found that http://www.quotationspage.com/mqotd.html has some good ones.
A much more versatile calendar program w/ RSS support is http://www.localendar.com
RSS はニュースヘッドラインだけじゃない
via digg: Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One ニュースヘッドラインやブログ以外で RSS が効果的に使われている例をカテゴリにわけてまとめて紹介しています。 さーっとリストアップす…
Another use is to organise lists. http://questsin.net is a list expander that supports RSS and RSL.
For RSS feeds of fares from your city, and including a fare monitoring Firefox extension, google earth overlay, google map overlay, and yahoo widget – please visit http://search.farecompare.com
For those Firefox users new to RSS, http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html explains in great detail how to add feeds in a simple way to Firefox.
It also explains how site owners with an RSS feed can make that little orange feed icon appear in Firefox.
I also dig the Nifty News and Decent Deals feed for tech gear sales:
http://www.niftyness.com/nndd/rss_nndd.xml
These are great suggestions. I posted something similar about using RSS to capitalize on Craigslist feeds. You can read about it here. I look forward to part two of your list.
http://www.sportspyder.com/ has great sports feeds for every team in MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA and college hoops
http://capetown.blogsome.com has a feed to keep up with latest attractions, reviews and events from Cape Town, South Africa. BTW, I don’t agree on the banking and bills rss, since it’s still unsecure. Does anyone know of secure RSS? Maybe call it SRSS? ;-)
great article. I think you should’ve used the term “XML feeds” because all the points in your article are relevant to Atom as well.
I’d like to see my bank account on RSS! That would be great.
How about getting new music in a genre that you like – http://www.tunecast.co.uk/music.aspx
Webnote is also a nice one. Anything you want to note down presented as a feed.
@Diesel: you can protect feeds by username/password-combination and send it over https. So if you have the right infrastructure, it should be quite secure.
However only a few readers support both security-features (usr/pwd-https), f.i. RSSBandit and RSSOwl, which are both freeware and open source.
Good list of uses of RSS
This site has a good list of uses for RSS
…
Possibili utilizzi dei feed RSS
Via micropersuasion, scopro questo interessantissimo post di basement.org, in cui viene suggerito un uso alternativo degli RSS.
…
Eventful.com has hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds for events, and lets you create ongoing searches and subscribe to them as RSS or iCalendar as well.
Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One
If someone asks you what you can do with RSS, you can give them a list after reading this post. The author will post more uses in an upcoming post. Link: Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One. Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part Onelink v…
For shopping deals Discount Watcher, might fit in better with your list as it is an automated service that finds the latest discounts and spits it out in 1000’s of different RSS feeds.
Using RSS for more than just headlines
While this doesn’t fall into the cellphone/camera phone category, it’s pretty cool and I thought it worth mentioning.
Basement.org has posted what looks like the beginning of a series on cool ways to use RSS/feeds for things beyond the usual news g…
I’d like to see my bank supply exchange rates, as soon as they change, via Rss.
You can also use Mozdex.com search as RSS to incorporate search results as you see fit.
And RSS is good for advertising.
I really love the morestuff4less rss feed!
Great (additional) Uses of RSS
I love RSS. Both in the simplicity and applicableness it offers to content creators and businesses. Basement.org has a list of a few potential uses. Anyone considering using RSS for marketing applications should check out pheedo and feedburner.
…
Other Cool Stuff You Can Do With RSS
I have long been a proponent of RSS feeds, just like everyone else on the Internet these days, and as such I found this page of cool alternate stuff that you can do with RSS. I have not done most…
Some more links
Funny people are attractive – Humour is an indicator of large brain size and good partner potential. Women generally preferred men who were funny, while men favoured a woman who thought he was funny.
Full color video on an 8088 – This video on google d
RSS for Free Events in New York City.
Useful Uses Of RSS
Rich Ziade has listed a number of ways to use RSS more creatively than just reading news headlines from blogs.
One of my favourite non-blog rss feeds is the Flickr Interestingness photo feed which isn’t listed, but I’ll have to look up the…
Hey how about Topic Clouds That are pulled from multiple RSS feeds and rolled into 1 Navigational Topic Cloud. This is a really neat way to organize content from multiple rss feeds. This based on Tags from multiple RSS feeds.
Here are 2 examples of this technology in use. Each Topic Cloud is pulling information from 6 RSS feeds.
http://blog.podblaze.com/topics
http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com/topics
Cheers.
Rodney Rumford
How about ringtones via rss! Wicked Ringtones offer ringtone charts via RSS feed. They even have a widget lol
Tracking Yahoo Finance groups is just another possible use of RSS.
Other ways to use RSS
Rich Ziade at basement.org has presented this list of ways to use RSS feeds other than just grabbing news. With all of the innovation going on with how we can use the Internet, RSS has definitely become a favorite tool…
Was man alles mir RSS machen kann
Auf Basement.org gibt es eine Menge Tipps für die Verwendung von RSS-Feeds (Pakete verfolgen, Benachrichtigung bei Sonderangeboten, das aktuelle Fernsehprogramm, tägliche Comicstrips, Email-Benachrichtigungen). Einige der Anwendungsmöglichkeiten si…
Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One
Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One
I’m a big RSS user, but I’ve found that many people are mystified by what they are and what to do with them. This site has a great list of things that people can get with RSS.
Even if…
Uses of RSS
Basement.org has posted different ways of using RSS beyond just headlines and news searches
…
I love the RSS feed from our BasecampHQ project management system. It’s a brilliant way to stay informed of movements and activities on our all of our projects. I can’t take getting emails and this is a perfect solution and keeps me tied to the progress of our projects.
12 Things You Can Get Besides News on the Web via RSS
Most people new to RSS don’t realize that you can use it to save yourself a heck of a lot of time and energy. Rich Ziade made a list of twelve different things you can grab off the Web…
For comics, comicalert.com is a service that lets you sign up for a list of comics, and it creates a feed for your account. Lots more are available there than through tapestry; there are only three or four I read regularly that don’t have their own official feed AND aren’t in comicalert.
Taking RSS beyond Headlines
Ein kurzer Artikel bei Basement zeigt was man mit RSS noch so anstellen kann ausser die Titel von Nachrichten oder Blogeinträgen zu übermitteln. Ein weiterer Artikel mit etwas obskureren Anwendungen ist schon angekündigt.
Die Site um sich das aktuelle
Taking RSS beyond Headlines
Ein kurzer Artikel bei Basement zeigt was man mit RSS noch so anstellen kann ausser die Titel von Nachrichten oder Blogeinträgen zu übermitteln. Ein weiterer Artikel mit etwas obskureren Anwendungen ist schon angekündigt.
Die Site um sich das aktuelle
Besides Tracking Blogs, What Can Be Done with RSS feeds?
Answer is here. Thanks to Lifehacker for the reference.
I think I am going to sign up for travel …
RSS feeds in retail will be quite common by the end of 2006. It’s so much less intrusive than email, and has better delivery percentages. That’s a hard thing to ignore.
We at iPCTV.net are about to build computers with a selection of aggregators into the consumer iPCTVs .. along with tutorials onusing RSS feeds.
great tips! thnx :)
cool uses of RSS
RSS other
Technorati Tags: rss
…
Another thought would be to use something like Feed43 to let you “watch” google or technorati search results – so the search could be repeated every day and if a new page appeared in (say) the top 20, it could be included in the feed.
This is a great list – going to link it from our blog! In a lot of ways this is exactly what we’re talking about with a gadget we are building designed to treat RSS less like news and more like an alerts/heads-up-display mechanism.
We call it ‘Touchstone’ and it is designed as an all purpose heads-up-display for applications you care about that generate RSS – not just news!
I’d love to hear what you think Rich – you can find us at http://www.touchstonegadget.com
Ebay categories and search filters via RSS at http://www.feedbay.net
Re feedbay – I get xml parsing error with the custom feed
XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://rss.feedbay.net/getsearch.php?q=chair&in=0&max=10&cid=2984
Line Number 4, Column 62:
Make a great idea even better if you could include a COUNTRY option for us non US people.
Great ideas and comments. Will hope this gets expanded soon. :)
RSS: Huhn?
As if I wasn’t already suffering from information overload, what with Mozilla Thunderbird setup to receive several RSS feeds from the BBC, CNN and /., I’ve also got news tickers running on my screen 24/7. Oh and trying to keep…
Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part Two
The first article on Taking RSS Beyond Headlines was very popular (mainly due to it’s proliferation on Digg and the resulting "Digg Effect.") It’s great to see this kind of interest and curiosity around RSS. Of course, latching a "Part…
is it possible to get the time in different timezones in the world in RSS?
RSS Everywhere
Anyone that follows this blog knows that RSS isn’t all about headlines and blogs. In a couple of posts (Taking RSS Beyond Headlines Part 1 and Part 2), I outlined all sorts of cool things you can do with RSS.It’s…
RSS Everywhere
Anyone that follows this blog knows that RSS isn’t all about headlines and blogs. In a couple of posts (Taking RSS Beyond Headlines Part 1 and Part 2), I outlined all sorts of cool things you can do with RSS.It’s…
Wednesday morning blog-bites
I’ve got a full day of catching up on grading and getting planned ahead, so I’m going to do all my blogging in bite-size form now:
Does anybody know if there is a quick way to make either my iPod or iTunes tell me how many songs I have in …
Check out http://www.kabraworld.com
For placing all the RSS into a single page http://feedraider.com is brilliant
For a list of the best RSS feeds in the following categories: Hacks, Tweaks and Life Tips, Internet Buzz, Web 2.0, New Sites, Blogging Tips, Tech News, Internet Marketing, Affiliates News and Webmaster Tools, check out this list: http://www.6initiative.com/my-favorite-rss-feeds-aggregated-to-one-feed-for-every-category/
this is a really great tip thanks a lot
Awesome article, this will definitely out me price my costs in the future
Funny people are attractive – Humour is an indicator of large brain size and good partner potential. Women generally preferred men who were funny,
RSS feeds in retail will be quite common by the end of 2007. It’s so much less intrusive than email, and has better delivery percentages. That’s a hard thing to ignore.
really great tips! thnx :)
yeh i agree these tips are amazing
Look at all the posibilities of this “factory” of widgets RSS “beon” presents you:
http://factory.beon4u.com/factory.aspx
It´s great, isn´t it?
I have the same problem as Philip. The extension worked for two days, after that it will clear the window and not display anything. I tried to uninstall mozilla, delete the profile and extensions and reinstall, but no luck :(
i also have the same problem as philip
This is a great list – going to link it from our blog! In a lot of ways this is exactly what we’re talking about with a gadget we are building designed to treat RSS less like news and more like an alerts/heads-up-display mechanism.
We call it ‘Touchstone’ and it is designed as an all purpose heads-up-display for applications you care about that generate RSS – not just news
RSS is just starting to take off. I wonder when they can be streamed to cell phones.
Find Shopping Deals. Another cool use of RSS is the ability to get entries when a shopping deal or coupon comes along.
Check it out: http://www.daddyodeals.com/phpBB/rss.php?f=1
Thank you for your informative article! I’m waiting more. Thanks again.
Thanks for the nice and useful tips!
Lax mentioned about Webnote. I like it too.
I also have the same problem as phillip, is there a fix?
Can phillips problem be addressed, I’m still having that problem :(
Cartoons!
Updated every 2 days or so.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PastExpiryCartoon
nice tips with RSS.
Nice tips! Btw, also checkout Feedity ( http://www.feedity.com ). It’s a neat simple online service for creating custom RSS feeds from virtually any webpage. Chao :)
It seems that many people are mystified by what RSS feeds are and what to do with them. good read though
better late than never………..these tips are great.
Here is a web service that provides RSS results for Google Search
http://www.ecubicle.net/gsearch_rss.asmx
Since the returned XML is RSS 2.0 compliant, the web service can also be called in a feed reader like this:
http://www.ecubicle.net/gsearch_rss.asmx/GetSearchResults?searchPage=0&gQuery=tutorial+asp+net&numOfResults=15
You need to change the searchPage, gQuery and numOfResults querystring parameters to your choice. gQuery parameter accepts all standard Google Search Operators.
The plugin stops working after a few days any work around?
Find the files you are looking for at http://all-shares.com the most comprehensive source for free-to-try files downloads on the Web
I don’t have the same problem as philip but I would like to. :-(
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