(Subscribing to a blog) and News Aggregators
RSS has changed the way the web works. Instead of going to websites to check if there’s anything new, RSS allows users to “subscribe” to a feed that brings new content. In the age of information overload, people are using RSS to personalize what information comes to them.
If you are new to blogs (short for weblogs) and RSS Feeds and would like to learn about them, you could start with the following Wikipedia entries: Blogging and RSS. David Gurteen also has a nice nontechnical explanation of RSS.
The good news is that you don’t really need to know much about Blogs, RSS or XML to subscribe. All you need is a news aggregator. Bloglines , NewsGator, and Google Reader are a couple of good beginning options because they are free, have a nice user interface, and do not require special software or knowledge. I use Google Reader, but there are many other good ones. Anyone with a news aggregator can copy and paste the link at the top of this blog’s Commitment to Living home page into an aggregator to this blog. If you have Newsgator, Bloglines, or MyYahoo, you use one of the buttons at the bottom of the home page.
Or, if you more visually inclined, just check out these nice short explanations produced by the folks at Common Craft, whom I admire so much: Blogs In Plain English and RSS In Plain English.
