What is a RSS Feed?
The RSS feed and the blog will change everything. I truly believe it. It could change everything now, but the general public needs to learn how to use the feeds, why they want to use them, and where this is headed.
The general idea (as I see it) is that the average person visits several different websites (their favorites) when they “surf” the web to catch up with anything new and exciting. An RSS feed is a compact version of this latest new and exciting stuff that can be used by a computer program to bring all of the new and exciting new from all of your favorite websites together.
How do I use an RSS feed?
Most websites that have feeds, advertise them with chicklets. The most common chicklet is orange and says “RSS” or “XML.” When you click on a chicklet, it takes you to the feed. Once you have the URL of the feed, you can cut and paste into a newsreader, home page, or “live” bookamark. What?
1. Newsreaders: These are computer programs that you download to your computer and install to read newsfeeds. Once installed, you tell it the location of the newsfeed on the internet and the program checks for any updates. So if you have ten newsfeeds (from your favorite websites) then you’ll be getting all the new and exciting news from your favorite websites all in once place as soon as it happens.
2. Home Pages: Many people use My Yahoo! or Google Personalized home page to check the daily weather, stocks, or see Garfield each day. The homepage on my browser is set to my Yahoo page and I check my horoscope and stocks at least five times a day. I can also add RSS feeds to this home page. So now my page has weather, stocks, cartoons, and the latest news from the ECHO blog as well as this one. Google has a very similar service as well as others.
3. “Live Bookmarks”: This is one of the hottest things out there and is a big part of the new Firefox. You can add an RSS feed to your bookmarks and quickly check the latest and greatest from your favorite website.