What the heck is a news feed?
From Google's Feed 101:
Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email.Sometimes feeds are called news feeds, RSS feeds or XML feeds (clear as mud?).
Why should I care?
By subscribing to a feed, you can get up-to-date alerts whenever there's new content on your favorite site or sites. Let's say Gary puts up a new post titled "Important links for Election 2008" on the blog.
Your feed reader will alert you in real-time that there's a new post called "Important links for Election 2008" and provide you with a quick link to that post. You can even ask your feed reader to give you a summary (more on feed readers below).
Who offers feeds?
Also from Google's Feed 101:
Most of the biggest names on the web offer content feeds including USATODAY.com, BBC News Headlines, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo!, Amazon.com (including a podcast!), and many more. Google publishes feeds as part of many of our services; for example, you can get a feed of new items for any search you make in Google News.You can find feeds by looking for these icons on web sites:
Also, you see that squarish orange chicklet? The first image? Look for that in the address bar of your favorite sites. I'll wait here while you check. Did you see it? That means there's a feed available. If you didn't see it, you probably aren't using FireFox. Internet Explorer 7.0 puts it under the address bar, to the right. I'm pretty biased towards FireFox, so your mileage may vary with IE7.
How do I use a feed?
It depends on what you want. You can plug a feed into your Google or Yahoo! homepage. That way, whenever you bring up your homepage, you'll see an up-to-date listing of the most frequent activity on your favorite sites (like this blog!).
Some people prefer a feed reader (also called a news aggregator). A feed reader like FeedDemon for Windows is a program that will not only help you get your news and information instantly, but can also help you customize the way you read and organize feeds. A neat FeedDemon feature is that it can detect when you have a ton of unread items and offers to mark them (or a subset of them) as read.
You can even set up a screensaver like this one with your favorite feeds. Then, whenever your screensaver comes on, you'll see news from any sites you subscribe to.
There are many cool ways to use feeds. What are yours?
