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Need an easy way to keep your favorite software applications up to date? Ever miss out on a newly released update patch, an important TechNote, or an urgent security bulletin? How do you know when Macromedia has published new Developer Center content that might show you some new timesaving techniques, or introduce you to an important emerging technology?

Staying on top of the latest official development news is not easy. And what about all the hundreds of interesting weblogs out there? In my opinion, there are two ways to stay current with the latest information: the easy way, and the hard way.

Staying Informed...the Hard Way
The hard way is to create bookmarks for all the different content you are interested in and set aside time to visit dozens of different locations online everyday. Going out and gathering information manually in this fashion is not particularly efficient for several reasons:

• Downloading takes time. Even over the fastest of connections, you still have to wait a fair amount of time for content to download, and the content that takes the longest to download (ads, graphics, etc.) is usually the content you are least interested in seeing.
• You have to figure out each new interface. Each of the dozens of sites I keep up with has a dramatically different interface with very different navigation. Although most of us are pretty accustomed to the inconsistency of the Internet by now, the time it takes to adapt to new and often very congested interfaces (as product and news sites tend to be) does add up.
• Other tasks take priority. I don't know about you, but when I'm busy, making my daily rounds to news sites and weblogs is often the first thing to go on the back burner, and, all too often, dropped entirely.
• Once it's gone, it's gone. When you miss an important headline out there, for all intents and purposes it's usually pretty much gone. How often do you search through the archives of a news site, trying to catch up on articles you might have missed? There's so much new information out there on an hourly and daily basis; who has time to review the old stuff?

Staying Informed...the Smart Way
Fortunately, the smart way to gather news and information addresses all of these issues. Rather than having to go out and get news and information yourself, why not let it come to you? Wouldn't it be nice to have all the most important product information and news headlines right on your desktop waiting for you, or all on a single Web page? With RSS (and a good RSS aggregator), that's exactly what you get.

RSS is an XML data syndication format. There's some disagreement as to what RSS actually stands for - whether it's "Really Simple Syndication," "Rich Site Summary', or "RDF Site Summary" - and there are enough versions of RSS and similar data formats like Atom out there that you may not care to get into the specifics of the data format itself. The important thing is what it can do for you.

The RSS data syndication format lets sites syndicate content in such a way that other applications can easily pick it up, parse it, reorganize it, and republish it in just about any format. What that means to you is that rather than spending time going out and gathering information yourself, an application gathers it for you. When you have time to read through it, it's all right there - waiting for you, all in one place, and in a nice, consistent format.

Not surprisingly, the advantages of RSS are basically the opposite of the disadvantages listed above:

1. It's fast. RSS is a very lean XML format, so even over slow connections huge amounts of data can be collected very quickly.
2. You can choose an interface that's right for you. RSS aggregators present data from many disparate sources in a single, consistent user interface.
3. You don't have to remember, or make the time, to go out and gather the information manually. True, you still have to make the time to read it. (I'm not aware of any technology that can dump information directly into your brain just yet.) But with all the news and information sitting right there in front of you in a single application, you can read it in the time that you would have spent simply gathering it from various sources.
4. It's easy to find "old" information. Most aggregators archive information so if you miss a day or two, you can easily scan through "old" headlines and see if you missed anything important.

About Aggregators
Generally speaking, there are two types of aggregators: online or Web-based, and local or desktop. Online aggregators are Web applications that gather information from all over the Internet and present it in a Web interface, while local aggregators present aggregated information for you right on your desktop. There are even various plug-ins available that will allow you to add RSS capabilities right to your browser; according to Apple's Web site, the next version of Safari will actually have sophisticated RSS functionality built right into it. There are advantages and disadvantages to both types of aggregators, so which you use is completely a matter of personal preference. I encourage you to try both types and see which you are more comfortable with.

News sites and weblogs were the first to start syndicating data through RSS, but now there are RSS feeds available that contain all kinds of information from real-time earthquake statistics to forum threads to MP3 music catalogs. At this point, RSS is being used to syndicate just about any kind of information you can imagine.

Getting Started with the Macromedia Product RSS Feeds
Macromedia has been tapping into the power and convenience of RSS and weblogs in various ways for about two years now. However, we have recently taken our investment to the next level with the new Macromedia Product RSS Feeds. We have been looking at ways in which we can communicate with our customers more efficiently and conveniently, and help them reduce the amount of time they spend looking for information on our Web site. RSS is a natural fit. Rather than requiring customers to visit macromedia.com on a regular basis to look for product updates, security bulletins, and TechNotes, we decided to use RSS to syndicate all this information for almost all of our products. And we include relevant Developer Center content in the feeds as well.

The Macromedia Product RSS Feeds are product specific, which means you can subscribe to just those feeds you are interested in. We are currently covering 18 different products and will continue to add feeds as we see the need. We update each feed within an hour of the release of product information on macromedia .com, so the information is pretty close to real time. All the information included in our product feeds is purely technical or educational in nature as well - we never syndicate marketing messaging or product offers.

If you use any Macromedia products on a regular basis, I highly recommend that you subscribe to their corresponding product RSS feeds using the online or desktop aggregator of your choice. The Macromedia Product RSS Feed page contains additional detailed information on RSS, the URLs to all the product RSS feeds, and information on how to get started aggregating feeds quickly and easily. Once you get into RSS, however, be careful, as it can be extremely addictive. I'm currently aggregating well over 200 feeds, and I seem to add more each week. Thanks to the efficiency of RSS, however, I actually have enough time to read them.