Lesson 2: RSS and Feedreaders
A catch phrase that you’ll often hear associated with blogs is RSS.
RSS stands for either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.
In brief, RSS allows you to “subscribe” (for FREE!) to Web content.
Review: You can find blogs with specialized search tools such as Technorati or Google Blog Search.
Then, you can subscribe to blog using a tool called a blogreader (also sometimes referred to as a feedreader or newsreader; you might hear the phrase “news aggregator,” too).
3 examples of blogreaders: Google Reader , NewsGator, and Bloglines.
Using a blogreader can save you a lot of time. Let’s say, for instance, that you are in the habit of visiting 10 separate news sites each day. You can actually have news stories from all 10 sites delivered to your blogreader. Translation: you don’t have to find information; rather, information finds you!
Below is a video - - RSS in Plain English - - about the aforementioned process:
(Be sure to “comment” on the video; let us know what you think about it!)
Your assignment:
1. Register for a free Bloglines account.
2. Find and subscribe to a minimum of 5 feeds.
Hint: Use Bloglines’ search box to find feeds. You’ll need to change the default “Search for Posts” to “Search for Feeds”. Then try to find feeds for your favorite news outlets such as CNN, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, etc. Once, you find a feed that you like, click on “Subscribe to feed”.
And guess what? You can even find and subscribe to this Baker’s Dozen blog in your Bloglines account. Likewise, you can subscribe to the AHML Staff Choices blog and the AHML RSS Feed, which announces library news and features.
Reminder: You can ask questions and post remarks in the “Comments” area, and someone will respond to you.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:54 am
It is also possible to use E-mail client software, for example Mozilla Thunderbird, to subscribe to feeds. The posts arrive and act much like E-mail messages, and they are downloaded to your local hard drive (in case you might want to save them).
Mozilla FireFox has a built-in mechanism for RSS called “Live Bookmarks.” This basically creates a “Bookmark” to an RSS feed, much like a “Bookmark” to a regular URL. The created Live Bookmark has the smarts to show postings in a pull-down menu.
So, there are many ways to access the same data. It is worth trying a few to see what feels best to you.
June 5th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Good information and nice succinct video. It’s unfortunate that I am about to fall prey to yet another web addiction. Oh well…
June 18th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
very cool! video was very good.