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What is RSS? What is a Blog?
Find out here how you can use this technology
for your benefit!
Blog is short for WeBlog and the practice
of blogging ushered in a new era of the world-wide-web as
a social medium. Blogs are hugely popular and the interactive
publishing platform of the future - they form a vibrant
global network for personal, political and artistic expression.
Bloggers debate, comment and share information covering
every conceivable subject from personal matters via computing,
celebrities and art to professional and shopping. People
create blogs to share their personal stories, viewpoints,
photos and links to other sites on the web.
There are about 52 million Blogs on the Internet at the
moment (Sep 2006) and over the past three years,
approximately 175.000 new Blogs were created every day -
two every second.
A Blog is a special kind of website with some very
clever publishing functionality that has a number of advantages
for readers and publishers alike.
One of these functionalities is called RSS, for
Really Simple Syndication. What it does is feed content
from Blogs to a News Reader (also called aggregator)
in your computer or on the Internet where you can read new
content from various Blogs you subscribe to in your own
time, all in the same place.
How does it work? What do you do?
Whenever you see any of these orange buttons 
 
or another plain RSS link on the Internet, it means
you can subscribe to content updates from that site to your
news reader by clicking on them, like the COMPASS
articles from BLUE CRANE.
Some big news-reading sites like My Yahoo, My
MSN or My AOL have their own customised buttons
for this - chances are that you already have an RSS news
reader as your home page. If not, you can easily set one
up for yourself and customize the content that you want
to read in it, like COMPASS.
If you don't like any of the above big ones, there are
also hundreds of specialised news readers like Bloglines
on the Internet - you can set up a free account with them
very quickly and easily. And then there are some others
which you have to download to your computer, sometimes for
a charge.
Why is this good?
Let me take my COMPASS eNewsletter and Blog
as an example.
At the moment, you are subscribed to the eNewsletter
and every week it arrives by eMail in your inbox - or
it doesn't, because of agressive spam filters
that most Internet Service Providers apply. In their wisdom,
they decide for you what you should receive and what not
- and they are often wrong.
If you want to make sure to catch all new content that
Bloggers and other publishers like BLUE CRANE post
to their Blogs, I suggest that you feed COMPASS
to your favourite news reader.
You can do this in addition to your eNewsletter subscription
- and see COMPASS along with all the other feeds
you want to keep up to date with in one place, whenever
you make time to read news that's important to you.
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COMPASS
Blog
How
do I find my paradise?
Subscribe to COMPASS now!
Or
subscribe online
with your eMail address here
Or
subscribe
for your RSS-Reader with :
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