Wordpress has enabled real-time updates for the millions of blogs using the service. Now you just need to know how to get news updates as soon they’re posted.

Now every time a blogger publishes a new post on his or her Wordpress.com blog, it sends out an RSS Cloud update in real-time. This means that posts can get to readers within minutes rather than once an hour with the current method.

There’s a new movement in town to make the Web more real-time. There are real-time search engines and news channels are struggling to keep up with real-time services such as Twitter.

But what good is a timely blog post if readers aren’t notified in real time? That’s exactly what the author of the RSS standard, Dave Winer, was thinking when he devised RSS Cloud.

RSS Cloud is the plumbing that allows blogs to update a server when they publish a new post. It’s as simple as that, except that  feed readers haven’t caught on to this new level of immediacy quite yet.

In order to get real-time updates, readers need to use a feed reader that is set up to work with RSS Cloud. Right now the only feed reader using the service is called River2.

Right now the only way to get near real-time updates is through a service called Ping-O-Matic. However this is generally too much strain on the feed reader’s server and so only a few services such as Google Reader use it.

The difference with RSS Cloud is that it allows readers to only subscribe to real-time blog updates that they want. That way the servers don’t need to get real-time updates from every blog – just the ones getting read.

For now that’s the only way to get real-time updates from some of your favorite blogs. Other feed readers are likely to add RSS Cloud support in short order now that Wordpress has thrown support behind it.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 9:35 am under Blogosphere.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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