Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

How many feel guilty for not working in local, national, and international news into your daily, or at least weekly, life? Do you think you might be more likely to if you were able to easily skim the headlines and then click out to anything you want to know more about? Try using an Real Simply Syndication (RSS) Aggregator to get caught up in the world. With an RSS Aggregator you can subscribe to any electronic source that provides an RSS feed. All blogs provide an RSS feed. Most newspapers and magazines provide RSS feeds from their websites.

For example, I like getting my world news from the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/). If you scroll to the bottom of their international edition homepage (the link above), there is a little link called “RSS Feeds.” Once you link on the feeds page, you can find a listing of a variety of types of feeds to which you may subscribe. However, to subscribe you first need an RSS Aggregator (or reader). Popular RSS Aggregators come in many shapes, sizes, and flavors:

• Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) combined internet based RSS aggregator & blogging tool
• Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) internet based RSS aggregator
• Newsgator (http://www.newsgator.com/) internet based RSS aggregator, can also include download on specific computers
• Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/) Mozilla/Firefox based RSS aggregator
• Gritwire (http://my.gritwire.com/) internet based RSS aggregator with more social software tools
• Sharpreader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) computer based aggregator, you must download software

I suggest you start with Google Reader—it has a lot of feeds for you to initially try and many website give it as a RSS subscription option. Like Google Reader, most RSS aggregators start you off with a few feeds to read. Similarly, you can also subscribe to a bunch of feeds from within the aggregator. However, if you find feeds outside of the aggregator, say your friend’s blog, you’ll need to manually add the subscription by finding the RSS feed URL (web address).

If you want to search for specific blogs about a topic, use these blog search tools:

• Blogarama (http://www.blogarama.com/)
• Feedster (http://feedster.com/)
• Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/)
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/)

If you want some more detailed instructions on how to use RSS feeds, especially searching for specific news topics and Google search hits, check out Will Richardson’s “RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators” (http://weblogg-ed.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/RSSFAQ4.pdf).