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RSS

RSS is an abbreviation most commonly used for "Rich Site Summary" or "Real Simple Syndication." RSS is a type of "Web feed file" or "Web syndication file" (coded in XML) that delivers summaries of Web content together with links to the full versions of the content. RSS makes it possible for readers to "subscribe" to the content that is created on a particular Website.

With RSS aggregators (which are increasingly known as RSS/Atom aggregators) you can read more content from more sources in less time by having the news and ideas for the day come to one location in headline format. There are many newsreaders that you can download to your computer; for a description and listing see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator

A good web-based aggregator (that you can access from anywhere you have an Internet connection) is Bloglines.com. Google Reader is another good option..

Setting up an RSS Feed Reader with Bloglines.com

1. Go to www.bloglines.com and use the "Sign up now" link and follow the procedures. You will get a confirmation email asking for a response in order to register.

2. To subscribe to feeds you can either select from the list of the most popular feeds (http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs) or manually add links by using the "Add" link at the top of your subscription list. You will need to paste the address of the feed into the subscription form.

3. In Bloglines you can make your folders public or private, reorder and sort them, post them to a blog or clippings list, and get up-to-the-minute results using the Blogline notifier (follow the download link at the bottom of the screen).

Finding and Adding Feeds

1. RSS feeds for many Weblogs are found on their homepages. On many it is a text link (e.g., "Syndicate this site (XML)" or an orange and white button. You will need to click on this link to get the address of that site's feed. You can also try copying and pasting the site's URL into an RSS aggregator's "add" box.

2. If you are not sure what blog you want, use a weblog search site (e.g., www.technorati.com or Google's blog search). A list of other RSS feeds from around the world is here: http://allrss.com/rssfeeds.html

Creating an RSS Feed

See the section of this website on Podcasting