How many pages a day do you visit and how much time do you spend visiting sites?

I use to spend close to 6 or more hours a day going from site to site looking to see if new content was there. I would visit news sites, blogs, forums and various other sites. This consumed a lot of my time but it seemed like the only solution.

Then about a year ago I started to hear about this thing called RSS. I did some investigation and noticed that almost 75% of the sites I visited had this little RSS button on them. So I downloaded an Outlook plug-in from Newsgator and started testing what this RSS thing was.

To my surprise I received new content into my inbox from these sites I use to visit. I didn’t have to go out and find the new content the new content found me. Those hours of going from site to site to was cut down now because I didn’t have to check if new content was updated.

The one issue I had with the Outlook solution was that it bogged my system down. Based on Matt’s recommendation I started testing Google Reader. Their reader is 100% online and will definitely not bog down your system. I also found a Google Reader Notifier that lets me know when new content is available.

So what is RSS?

Wikipedia summarizes it as…
“a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.”

Why should I use RSS?

It will free up the time you spend online seeking out new content. Instead the new content will come to you. Also unlike spam if you don’t want to get the content anymore you can unsubscribe and never get it again.

If you want to test out an RSS reader sign up at Google Reader and then add our RSS Feed.