Cloudeight Specials! - Registry Mechanic 20% Off - Spyware Doctor 20% Off

What are feeds (RSS)?

You may have seen those little orange buttons that say RSS. You can click those and view the RSS feed from that page. But, more than half of the people using Internet don’t know what feeds are. If you are one of these, then read on. If you browse through a lot of websites or Blogs then you, my friend, should know what feeds are because they would make your browsing easier. RSS actually stands for Really Simple, Stupid! No, no, just kidding. It stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Feeds provide subscribers with updated content from blogs and web sites that support feeds without having to visit the web site or blog itself.

The 3 main types of Feeds are: RSS , Atom , XML. Whichever format your favorite feed is in, it really is nothing more than a form of syndication...just like your favorite syndicated column in your local newspaper a feed is "broadcast" to all its subscribers at one time. So think of a feed as a syndicated newspaper column. When it's published it appears in hundreds of newspapers around the world all at once. See? Feeds aren't anything new, they're decades old - they just haven't really caught on the way the geeks expected. That's why more than 50% of you don't know what they are.

Newer versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox allow you to read feeds directly from the browser - however the feed readers in browsers are limited. If you are really a fan of feeds you'll probably want to use a "Feed Reader". A dedicated feed reader allows you add the feeds from your favorite sites where they are updated automatically. Any time your favorite blog or RSS-enabled Web site is updated, the information in automatically "fed" to your feed reader. In other words you don't have to keep going back to the site to see what's new. There are many different feed readers available with varying Many of them are free. Some of the free ones include: Google Reader, MyYahoo, Bloglines, Netvibes, Newsgator, FeedDemon, etc. Feed readers allow you to integrate, organize and browse your favorite feeds without ever opening your browser.

Will feeds ever really catch on? Maybe not the way it was first imagined they would. But many programs use feeds to provide updated content to users. If you're using Vista and still have the Sidebar displayed, you're using feeds. If you use our CalendarPal program, the weather information comes to you via web feeds provided by Accuweather.

See more examples of page content being displayed using feeds at http://thundercloud.net/start/ . The World News, Tech News, and Tips are all displayed in real time using feeds.

So feeds are everywhere yet more than half of you don't know (and probably don't care) what they are. Isn't that fascinating?