News

In my last column I wrote about blogs and how to find ones that you might be interested in. I mentioned at the end that one of best ways to keep up with the blogs that you like is to read them using a technology called  RSS , which stands for "Really Simple Syndication" (or "Rich Site Summary, depending on who you talk to). So this week's column is about what that is and how you can use it to keep up with all the blogs that you like to follow.

What RSS does is allow pretty much any website or blog to offer a feed of information that people can subscribe to and read whenever they want, using a number of tools (both Web-based readers and desktop software that you have to download and install).

Essentially, RSS means that instead of having to go to all the individual webpages that you want to read and hitting "refresh" whenever you think there might be something new added, you can have the latest blog posts or updates come to you instead.

One if the easiest ways to read RSS feeds is through your Web browser. Firefox , which is an alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, has had RSS-reading capabilities built into it for some time now. When you visit a website, a small orange icon with a white dot and two semi-circular lines on it — the most widely-accepted symbol for RSS — appears in the address window. When you click on that icon, you get a selection of the RSS "feeds" that are available from the site, and you can choose to subscribe to whichever one you like.

Some sites, such as globeandmail.com and some other newspaper or media websites, have a page where they list all their RSS feeds, and try to make it easy for you to copy and paste the URL (or address) of the feed into whichever feed reader you like to use. The nice thing about the Firefox feature — known as "Live Bookmarks" — is that it will sense when a site has an RSS feed without you having to find it. When you subscribe, you will be able to see headlines from that blog or site in a sidebar in your browser, and it will automatically update them.

Internet Explorer 7 also includes support for RSS feeds in much the same way. Feeds are automatically detected in websites and blogs, and you can subscribe to them and read them using a sidebar the same way you do for bookmarks. And if you'd rather use your email program instead of your Web browser, there are several programs — including Attensa and NewsGator — that will take RSS feeds and add them to an email client such as Outlook.

Desktop feed readers that you download and install include FeedDemon (owned by the same company that owns NewsGator), Blogbridge and SharpReader . For Apple fans, NetNewsWire is one of the most popular RSS readers (owned by the same company that makes NewsGator), and the Safari browser also includes support for RSS feeds. With most programs, you simply type in the URL of a feed and it is added to a list — or, in some cases, the software will autodetect a feed if you point it towards a website that has one.

One of the downsides with a feed reader that is installed on your PC, however, is that you have to install it on every PC that you might want to read RSS feeds on. And if you read feeds while you are at work, the version of the software that you have at home won't know that, and will show them as unread, which can get confusing. One of the solutions to that is a Web-based feed reader.

NewsGator has a Web-based reader (which can synchronize with FeedDemon's desktop software), and so does a company called Bloglines . A number of Web "portal" pages also support RSS feeds, including My Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com , Google's personalized home page , Pageflakes and Netvibes . Most of these sites allow you to configure a page with multiple feeds, which can be moved around and set up to automatically refresh the information from a website (including blogs, stock tickers, weather data and so on).

Google also launched a standalone RSS reader last year, called (not surprisingly) Google Reader . Like many Web-based readers, it gives users a small "bookmarklet" that they can drag to the toolbar on their favourite browser, and when visiting a site with a feed they can click the bookmark and have it automatically added to the reader. Users can also import OPML files, which are just lists of RSS feeds from other readers. Google's Reader makes it easy to see all the items in a feed either in "headline" view or expanded view, and users can "star" the posts they want to keep or rememeber for later.

Google's Reader also has another interesting feature: at the bottom of each post in an RSS feed is a menu item that says "share." When clicked, the post is added to a custom-made RSS feed that others can subscribe to, and it also appears on a custom-generated, blog-like webpage of all a user's shared items. That makes it easy for those without blogs to share items they come across with friends. And Google also has a mobile version so you can read feeds on your phone or PDA (NewsGator also has a mobile version).