What is RSS?
Depending on whom you ask, the acronym RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", "Rich Site Summary", or any of a handful of others.
The meaning of the acronym is not terribly important, however. An RSS feed (also known as a news feed) is a site's syndicated news feed that you subscribe to using your news reader.
What is a news reader?
A news reader (also known as a news aggregator) is simply a piece of software that you can use to read your subscribed news feeds. It is to news feeds what Outlook, Hotmail, and Entourage are to email.
Should I use a news reader?
The short answer: it depends.
The longer answer: if you visit a lot of websites on daily basis, or read a lot of weblogs (or "blogs"), a news reader can save you a lot of time. Sites like ABCNews.com, Salon, and the New York Times all have syndicated feeds.
Using a news reader to consume your web media means that you only need to visit a website when you read a story in your news reader that is of interest to you. You won't have to visit many sites multiple times every day to see if there are updates; your news reader will do that for you and will let you know when there is a new story to be read!
So if you visit a lot of websites regularly, or want to be alerted automatically when your websites publishes a new story, using a news reader might make sense.
Some commonly used news readers are Feed Demon, Sharp Reader, and NewsGator (an Outlook plugin) for Windows, NetNewsWire and Shrook for Macs, and Bloglines.com for those who like web-based readers.
You can find even more news readers at itopik.com.
|
