What’s a Feed - And Why Do I Want to ‘Add’ It?
Depending on who your talk to, feeds are the next replacement for email, or just a convenient way to read sites quickly - you choose!
So if they’re so darn important - what are they?
The simplest explanation is that a feed is a text-only representation of the blog’s contents - minus all the images, colors, and layout that adds so much to a site (of course, that’s not entirely true: images are possible, but not as many as a regular website, and it’s rare).
So why use it? Without all that images and coloring, the text is much quicker to load and read - which means you can read a number of feeds much faster than visiting each of your favorite blog sites, and scanning the pages for new postings.
Also, RSS feeds are a machine-friendly format. Since computers can read feeds easier than blog pages (which are actually very complicated for computers to decipher), there’s a whole slew of programs and sites out there willing to manage your feeds for you. For example, Google, Technocrati, or MSN. For each of these sites, you can use the little RSS Feed ‘add’ buttons to add to their list - just click on the appropriate one and follow the instructions.
Which brings us to feed readers - programs that let you grab all these feeds for blogs you’re interested in, and scan them in one place. Same as the sites - but nothing to join, as the program runs on your computer.
The results? Once you see an icon on a website, you can use that icon to ‘add’ your feed to the the appropriate site - and be able to ’skim’ your favorite blogs like reading the morning paper!
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