Ok, so what seems to work is for me to use these posts to explore some of the things I feel dumb about. Helps me play catch up and not feel so out of synch. So . . . RSS. Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a clue what it was except that somewhere, I had heard that it stood for Really Simple Syndication. I think. There. I’ve said it. I haven’t a clue. Let’s learn about it.

When you enter RSS in Wikipedia, the article starts like this: “RSS is a family of web feed formats . . . “ That sort of made sense but I wanted to dig a little deeper so I followed the link to “web feed”. Ah. Neat article here. I learned the following:

• If you’ve got content (which, I guess, means anyone who has anything on the Web) – as a content owner, you can “syndicate” that content. (Here’s a fun tangent – I tried to look up “syndicate” on Wikipedia and the article wasn’t helpful. I was about to leave Wikipedia for Miriam-Webster when I noticed a little thing in the side bar that suggested I look up syndicate in the Wiktionary! What a great name! That entry wasn’t totally helpful either but basically, it seems like syndicating content just means that you distribute it.)
• Once you’ve syndicated your content (which I’m not sure how to do but that will be a different article), then a user can subscribe to that content.
• The user signs up to receive the content with something called an aggregator (also called a feed reader or a news reader).

Feed readers. Some stuff to learn here:

• It’s like getting an email except that you don’t have to give them your email address (which makes it safer).
• Personalized home pages like My Yahoo, My MSN and My AOL use feed readers to present your news, weather, stock quotes, etc.
• There are other web-based tools that are made just for feed reading. A popular one is Bloglines. I think the Netvibes thing we’re using in class is maybe a feed reader plus other stuff?
• Firefox has a feed reader built into its toolbar called Live Bookmarks; IE 7 has a similar one called Favorites
• You can also get desktop feed readers that you download (e.g., Newsgator and Feed Demon).
• Attensa is a feed reader for Outlook

Whew. Ok, now I just need to sign up for some (aside from what we did for Netvibes) and practice using them so they become old hat.