[Sigia-l] Corporate blogs, again

[Beth Mazur]

>What is an RSS feed?

RSS stands for real simple syndication. Browsers read HTML; news aggregators
read RSS, and fortunately, common weblog tools generate both easily.

The advantage to RSS feeds is that people can "subscribe" to them by adding
the RSS URL to their news aggregator. Then all they need to do is fire up
the aggregator, and it goes out and checks to see if there are any new
entries to the weblog. Aggregators behave differently; some show you
excerpts, others show you the full text, others show you links to the
original site. (If you're an old fart, a news aggregator is to weblogs the
way that news readers are to Usenet news groups.)

If you've surfed weblogs long enough, you'll see the real advantage to this.
Rather than going and visiting the HTML version of a weblog every day for a
week only to find no new news (which gets tired really fast), checking feeds
via an aggregator does this in the background. Because of this, you can
easily keep track of tens or hundreds of RSS feeds.

Here's an article that has more info and links to some useful tools.
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php

Beth Mazur
IDblog: http://idblog.org