Those little orange buttons mean a new way to get news

LIKE me, you may have witnessed in the last few months the proliferation of little orange buttons emblazoned with the letters “RSS” or “XML” on travel websites. Although I knew in theory what kind of information these buttons might bring to my computer desktop, in practice I just didn’t get it. Knowing that the acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication didn’t make it one bit simpler to understand.

So I set out to find what we non-geek but still savvy Internet users need to know about this new way of customizing the travel information we can receive on our computers.

First, RSS is a tool that lets you subscribe to a particular type of information that you wish to receive. It’s similar to an e-mail subscription, but if a particular news item fed to your desktop does not interest you, you simply ignore it (unlike e-mail that demands you act on it in some way -- read it, delete it, get mad and try desperately to unsubscribe). This goes a long way to explain the no-hassle appeal of RSS. Most of us have grown weary of in-boxes clogged with information.

“People who tend more toward RSS than e-mail want to be in control” of the information they receive, said Laura Johnston, vice president of customer loyalty at Travelocity, which for three months has been testing its own RSS feed promoting deals. (You can access it at this point only by going to rss.travelocity.com).

Second, RSS and XML are, for the purpose of understanding the feeds, the same thing. No difference.

And third, and most problematic, it’s still a little rough around the edges on some websites. But it is getting better.

Perhaps the simplest way to understand RSS is to use AOL as an example. The welcome page on AOL acts as a news feeder to your desktop. News headlines appear as hyperlinks that you can click on to take you to a webpage for the full story. The difference between AOL’s news feeder and an RSS news feeder is that you customize it, getting information only from the sources that you specify.

I set out to create my own RSS news feeders for travel information using My Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). Other news feeders are available. (Orbitz has a good list with links to some of the more popular ones on its RSS page -- click on the RSS button on Orbitz’s home page -- but My Yahoo is free and user friendly.)

More than 30 million people have created My Yahoo pages since their public launch in September 2004, and there are about 20 million RSS feeds with My Yahoo buttons, said Yahoo spokeswoman Meagan Busath.

Once you have created a Yahoo account, click on the My Yahoo button. There you will find a page with preset sources of information. You can get rid of any or all by simply clicking on the X in the upper right corner of each box.

Using My Yahoo, there are several ways to subscribe to content. Start by clicking on “add content.” There is a “find content” box that allows you to search the Web for RSS content. If you type in something as broad as “travel,” hundreds of sources of information appear by way of RSS, such as feeds of travel deals and newspaper’s travel sections. You can also click on a link to the most popular RSS feeds or to a list of links chosen by Yahoo’s editors.

But what about those little orange buttons popping up on travel websites? Here is where things get a bit more complicated.

Orbitz makes it very simple to subscribe to its RSS feeds when using My Yahoo. You sign on to Orbitz, go to its RSS page and simply click on the My Yahoo button next to the deals you are interested in keeping up on. You can select flight deals by city of origin or hotel and vacation package deals by destination, among other options.

At Travelocity, you can select flight deals for up to five destinations from one city. Clicking on “create my feed” takes you to another page where you can click on your news feeders.

Kayak has three RSS feeds, though compared with the others I looked at, they are not quite ready for prime time. When you select its Buzz Best Fares Feed, you get a scary XML page. Do not panic. This is exactly the kind of page you may find when you click on an RSS button on many websites. All you need to do is copy the URL and paste it in your news feeder. (Problematically for us non-geeks, to make Kayak’s RSS Buzz information relevant, you must replace the last three letters of the URL with the airport’s code you are interested in getting deals from. For deals from LAX, for example, you must replace the letters “BOS” with “LAX” and hit enter on your keyboard. Kayak is working on making it less cumbersome in the near future, said co-founder and chief technology officer Paul English.)

Besides deals, Kayak has an RSS travel blog feed consisting of information from selected travel blogs.

Subscribing to a travel blog, such as Today in the Sky at USA Today, a daily blog about air travel that I check every day (blogs.usatoday.com/sky), is as easy as clicking the orange XML button. Some travel blogs, such as the Daily Traveler that I write for The Times (latimes.com/dailytraveler) haven’t yet reached that ease. The best way to subscribe is to search for the Daily Traveler on the My Yahoo “add content” page.

I now have seven travel information RSS feeds set on My Yahoo. And although not all the information I get is of interest, I do like being able to scan the headlines. Opting out of any source is as simple as clicking the X in the upper right. Now that’s Really Simple Syndication.

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James Gilden writes The Daily Traveler blog at latimes.com/dailytraveler.