Curate your own newspaper with RSS
August 7, 2025
Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.
Gather round kids and let me tell you about the olden days of the Web. Where there were no walled walled gardens like Facebook and Instagram–people published on their own web sites. Where aggregation theory hadn’t kicked in, and small number of aggregators hadn’t enclosed the entire web.
Perhaps the highpoint of this web was RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, a (sort of) standard that still underpins podcasting and grew out of blogging. It allows (still around) you to subscribe to blogs, and any sort of content, and gives these the super power of curating the content they want to receive.
There are plenty of open source and commercial RSS, or “Feed” readers and services, and moving between them is trivial, using OPML.
Here Molly White encourages us to curate our own newspapers using RSS.
The old web isn’t coming back-but its spirit isn’t entirely dead.
