Yet another publication brings themselves over to the realities of RSS.
The trouble with the Web is it’s a time pig. Although you know you should check regularly for fresh content on sites that matter to your business, you seldom get around to it. So thank goodness for the emergence of RSS: Really Simple Syndication.
In really simple terms, RSS is the poor man’s newswire, allowing any Web-savvy organization to alert the public to new content on its site via its RSS “feed.” You can sign up for and read a feed using one of the scores of available RSS readers or “aggregators,” many of them free. (For details, click here.) Open most reader windows and you’ll see three panes: one listing feeds to which you’ve subscribed (e.g., BBC Headlines, Wired News), one with headlines for recent postings and one with the postings’ full text.
While most feed readers force you to click a button to update headlines, Bloglines, a free but highly functional Web-based aggregator, can be set to check automatically for new postings every 30 seconds to every 24 hours, alerting you to new ones via a small icon and optional audio tone. Some readers will display alerts in a browser window or headline ticker crawling across your screen, or even send you an e-mail for each item published. And RSS is expected to soon evolve so users can customize their feeds with keywords….Canadian Business Online