Confused by RSS? Don't know what a "feed" is?

Don't despair. Check out this post via Roland Tanglao.

Chris Sells - What is an RSS Feed?. (SOURCE:The Sells Spout)- Nice, gentle intro.  My favourite RSS readers are Radio and NetNewsWire.  For non techies, though, I recommend Bloglines.

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While RSS is fairly unreadable for normal humans, computers eat it up. For example, if you read the RSS feed from my site on a regular basis, whenever I make a new post, youll see a new entry in the RSS feed. RSS feeds aren't useful for you, but when fed to an RSS reader program, you can keep up to date on literally hundreds of web sites without having to browse to them manually. The RSS reader will check each RSS feed to which you subscribe, letting you know when something new on a web site has happened and showing you what it is, giving you the option to follow up or ignore the new thing. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, letting me keep up on a bunch of things:

• My friends' writings
• Global and financial news
• People talking about topics of interest to me, like my favorite technologies or my latest book
• My favorite comics strips (I need my daily Dilbert!)
• The latest product and articles releases from Microsoft
• Practically anything else I care about on a regular basis

I keep up on all of this without ever visiting the web sites themselves them til something of interest catches my eye.

There are a bunch of RSS readers in the world, but my favorite is SharpReader. If you install this program and start it up, SR will check all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to on a regular basis in the background while you work, notifying you of something new by changing its icon from blue to yellow. If you decide to install SharpReader, your next stop should be NewsIsFree.com, where you'll find all kinds of RSS feeds in any number of categories. After subscribing to a few of those, you'll want to stop by Tapestry, where you can find RSS feeds for tons of daily comic strips. If you want to get fancy, you can go to GoogleAlert, where you can subscribe to searches so that whenever Google finds something new on your search topic, your RSS reader will let you know.

If you find the ability to track hundreds of web sites without surfing to each of them manually, RSS is for you. If you find my instructions intimidating, ask a computer friend to help you out (I'll be home for Christmas, Mom).

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10:46:23 AM