Recently I wrote an e-mail to Deepak Mankar, who writes an interesting “blog-like” story collection on the new economy called QuiteATake over at HindustanTimes.com (online portal of one of India’s largest daily newspaper). I had suggested Deepak that QuiteATake articles should be available as a RSS/Atom feed on the HT website.
Almost all news portals in today’s date provide aggregated news in XML format. You may as well have seen those little yellow/orange buttons with “XML” or “RSS” written over them on some sites. Among Indian portals, Rediff.com for one already does that. RSS/Atom syndication would enable regular readers of QuiteATake (like myself) to subscribe to the news feed using a newsreader (I recommend RSS Bandit, coded in .NET ofcourse ;)). Think of it like checking your e-mail in a desktop software (like Microsoft Outlook) against checking your e-mail on a website. I find the former a more convinient and efficient way, considering that I have more than one e-mail account. I have all my mail accounts setup in Outlook (even Gmail) and all the news sites subscribed in RSS Bandit. The biggest advantage of this “aggregation” approach is that I don’t have to check my e-mail’s or, news (sites) for that matter, by visiting each respective website. At a click of a button, my e-mail’s and news subscriptions are updated (over the Internet)!
Well guess what, Deepak certainly took note of it. He forwarded my suggestion to the concerned HT editor and also mentioned about my suggestion in a QuiteATake story on Gmail (titled: WALLA OUTGOOGLES GOOGLE. Howzzat?).