In my last article, I provided an overview of blogs. These Web diaries can be an interesting way to connect with others, keep up on new ideas or rally around a cause. Keeping current on a blog typically means returning each day to the blogger’s Web site and reading the latest entry. Staying current on several blogs, however, can be a very tedious task. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could track all the blogs you follow in one place? Better yet, add in tracking of news and industry sites. Guess what, there are several ways to do this.
It all starts with a technique called RSS or Real Simple Syndication. RSS puts blogs and newsfeed into a form that other software can read and manipulate. Imagine it this way. Let’s say you usually thumb through a travel magazine to find articles on Caribbean travel, then a home improvement magazine to read gardening tips, and an automatic update for Formula 1 racing, and finally your favorite acerbic columnist. Instead, you open a collection called “MyBits” and see titles like “Caribbean Travel from Travel Mag”, or “Formula 1 News from Car Mag”. Under each title, you find the latest articles listed, and every time you open “MyBits” all the article listings are updated.
The Internet equivalent of “MyBits” is an RSS aggregator. Simply put, it’s a method to gather blogs and news feeds in one location.
Bringing Them All Together
My least favorite aggregation method is to use standalone readers on the desktop. These are separate programs that allow you to subscribe to feeds, then shuffle through individual articles. My beef with this method is that you have to open a new program just to keep up on the feeds.
Another, more palatable, method uses your existing Web browser in a couple different ways. Some of the portal or homepage sites are starting to add RSS aggregators to their feature lists. MyYahoo! and MSN both recently added the ability to add blogs and news feeds to your personal pages. This makes keeping up as simple as going to your portal page.
If your portal provider doesn’t have this feature, you can start your own collection at sites like Feedster (http://www.feedster.com) or Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com). I found each of these a little more than confusing. Plus, they suffer from the same “extra step” syndrome that standalone viewers face.
Live Bookmarks Are Favorite
By far my favorite way to use RSS feeds is Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Firefox is a new Web browser that is beginning to erode the dominance of Microsoft’s troubled Internet Explorer. You can grab a free copy of Firefox at http://www.mozilla.org. If a site has been set up to deliver a feed, you can add a bookmark or favorite to the browser. But these bookmarks aren’t static like normal bookmarks. They are “live” and always changing. I use Firefox for most of my Web browsing these days. Here’s an example of how I use the Live Bookmarks. I recently added a Live Bookmark to CNN’s Science and Technology section (from http://www.cnn.com/services/rss/, then clicking on a button on Firefox that looks like a satellite dish). Now, when I click on the bookmark, it drops down a list of current articles for that section of CNN. And the list is automatically updated every time I look at it.
Blogging and blog reading is just evolving. In fact, the creation of blogs seems to be outstripping the reading of blogs. More tools will continue to emerge that may (or may not) make it easier to keep up. Until then, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has the jump on everyone else. On top of that, by using Firefox you add an extra layer of protection against spyware and some of the other nasties that have been directed at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Happy blogging.
