The New York Times finally has a page headed with my father's initials: RSS

That is, the Times has joined the growing list of news organizations offering their own pages of Really Simple Syndication feeds. Until today, the Times RSS feeds were offered through a partnership with Userland software. The new 27-item feed list eliminates a few earlier categories (Education, Dining & Wine, Home & Garden), but the others are redirected to the new addresses.

New feeds include weekly sections like the Sunday Magazine, (Thursday) Circuits and Week in Review, as well as a "most e-mailed" story list, and the bloglike Times on the Trail presidential campaign page. Another feed lists "Multimedia" contents of the Times on the Web -- at the moment primarily slide shows of photos from the paper. (There are no multimedia enclosures in the feed, just one or two sentences and a link.)

RSS Link Benefits

If the new system continues the policy followed with the Userland version, the RSS feeds not only provide "syndicatable" story summaries, headlines and links for use in personal weblogs, those links have extra benefits: Readers can follow them without being asked to register at the Times site, and the links do not "expire" into the paper's pay-per-view archives after a week.

For example, here is a link delivered by a partner=Userland Times RSS feed last summer, and here is the standard version of the same link, redirect to an archival abstract: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/international/europe/11TOBA.html

(Except for reviews, most Times news pages cost $1 to $3 per story to retrieve from the archives.)

Other RSS News Sources

While my Dad was an early adopter of RSS as his personal initials, he named me RBS, for Robert Bruce, the legendary king of Scotland. So I like the irony of discovering the biggest collection of RSS news feeds I've seen at a newspaper called The Scotsman.

Here are a few other news organizations' RSS offerings, ranging from major news topics and features like "most e-mailed" or "recent updates" (see the Boston Globe, below) to some finely-sorted news pages at the BBC and The Scotsman, which provides 574 feeds, including obituaries of famous people and pages about (or in) Kilts and Gaelic:

Reuters (16 feeds)

The BBC (17 main feeds, and look for more on section pages)

The Washington Post (12 feeds)

Baltimore Sun (57 feeds)

The Christian Science Monitor (24 feeds)

The Boston Globe (13 feeds; 10 from the Globe, three from Boston.com, including "updated news stories" between editions of the newspaper)

ABC News (15 feeds)

The Telegraph (28 feeds)

The Scotsman (24 main feeds, but 574 total)


7:30:38 PM  #