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I’m writing to you today from my cozy one-room cabin in the mountains west of Boulder, Colorado. Yesterday, I finally had a phone line installed so I can work from up here, which means I get to enjoy my cabin a lot more than in previous years. (Oh, admit it, you’d do it too if you could…)

However, this does mean that I’m forced back to the painfully slow world of dialup Internet access, at least part of the time. Yes, I’ve definitely been spoiled badly by having wireless broadband at my home office. But now I get to see how most of the world gets around the Net – a very useful reality check.

Just to put dialup in context, even in the Net-hungry US the vast majority of Internet users primarily use dialup connections. According to this March 10, 2004 Wired News article, nationwide only 36 percent of Net users have broadband. I don’t have the global statistics handy, but I’m certain that throughout the world the vast majority of Net users are on dialup.

By rejoining the dialup masses (at least part-time), I’ve realized yet another significant benefit of RSS feeds:

RSS feeds are ideal for dialup users because they can deliver a lot of information using very little bandwidth.

Case in point…

This morning, I’m chugging along at 21.6 kbps. Normally, one of my first daily stops on the Net is Google News, because I prefer to first check news from a rich variety of sources from around the world.

Google News is a fairly lean site (just headlines, brief blurbs, occasional photos, and source listing), so its home page pops up virtually instantly when I’m at home on broadband. Just now, I accessed that site by dialup – and it took one full minute for the Google News home page to fully load!

ACK!

For some unfathomable reason, Google does not yet offer any RSS feeds of its own. (They do a great job with Google News Alerts, but that’s only available by e-mail.)

Fortunately, one savvy programmer has created several Google News RSS feeds that anyone can subscribe to. This generous person wrote a Perl script that parses the HTML code on the Google News site every 15 minutes. These feeds are free of charge – although you can make a donation to the programmer if you like. (I’m so grateful for his efforts, I did exactly that. Google, however is far less grateful for efforts such as this.)

What kind of a difference does this make when I’m using dialup Net access?

Well, in my favorite RSS feed reader (Feed Demon) I currently subscribe to 22 feeds in my “news-General” group. Each feed delivers headlines (and usually summaries, and occasionally full text) of the latest news stories from many of my favorite news sources: BBC News, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, etc. This list now also includes those handy Google News RSS feeds I just mentioned.

I just pulled down fresh content from all 22 feeds in that group. This took a total of 45 seconds to complete. That’s right: 45 seconds to retrieve headlines and summaries from 22 top-notch news venues, as opposed to a full minute to retrieve similar information for just one of those venues!

Here’s what that looks like in my feed reader. (Note: this 126K image will take a few seconds to download if you’re on dialup.)

The value that RSS feeds offers me, as a dialup user, is that I can quickly scan what’s on offer from many news venues and aggregators and then decide which stories I wish to take the time to download and read. Also, reading just the news headlines and summaries gives me a decent overview of what’s happening in the world. When downloading a single Web page can take a minute or more, depending on the quality and speed of my connection that day, I’d much rather check the news via RSS than tediously visit site after site, waiting for Web page after Web page to download.

Keep in mind that this holds true for much more than just news. I can also quickly catch up on what’s happening with my favorite weblogs, some online discussion forums (like communities and diaries in LiveJournal, which list new postings by RSS) – and even, if I wanted to, the latest publications from the state of Wisconsin.

So if you’re one of the millions of Net users who use dialup access, you definitely can save time while accessing some of your favorite online content, in a more organized fashion, by learning how to subscribe to RSS feeds. (Read my backgrounder on RSS: What Is RSS, and Why Should You Care?)

What if your favorite sites don’t offer RSS feeds? Or at least, not exactly the kind of RSS feed you want? Ask them to create one! Yes, just bug them. I’ve made this easy with my RSS request form letters (general version and journalist’s version).