You'll see this symbol on our site and many others: . It indicates the presence of an news feed that you can subscribe to. If that means nothing to you, don't worry. In this article I'll explain what a news feed is and why you may benefit from using it.

Background

You are probably familiar with blogs, which are used to report on personal or news events. Imagine that you had a blog and every day or two, you added a new entry. Your postings are not on any regular schedule. For your fans to keep up-to-date, they need to check your site on a regular basis to see if anything new has appeared.

Now imagine that you are the blog reader. How likely is it that you would make the effort to repeatedly visit every blog site that might interest you? Someone figured out that there had to be a better way to read blogs and the news feed was born.

With a news feed, each new blog article gets added to a special file. As a reader, you use a special type of software called a news reader to read these files. When you add the file's location to your reader, you are said to be subscribing to the news feed. Each time you start your news reader, it checks each of your subscriptions and looks for articles you haven't read. It presents these to you—you can read the ones that interest you and discard the rest.

In years past, people accomplished this with e-mail newsletters (actually, they still do—many people like to stick with what they know). Each new article or set of articles would be e-mailed to each subscriber. You would read them with your regular e-mail program, and save or delete the messages as appropriate.

If e-mail works, why use a news reader? There are several advantages:

• You can subscribe and unsubscribe at any time and the effect is immediate.
• You do not need to give out your e-mail address or tell anyone about your subscriptions.
• You can read articles on your schedule, not on whatever schedule the author uses to send e-mails.
• A good news reader will make it easy to go through the articles you receive and find the ones you are interested in.

Another view

There is another way to think about news feeds that highlights the connection to news.

Imagine that a news reader is software that lets you design your own newspaper. You place world news on page one and local news on page two. You add a business section, an entertainment section and so on. The content for each section of your paper comes from the various news feeds you select. Just as you read the newspaper each morning, you can bring up your news reader once a day to see the articles that have been added.

The advantage of this model is that it makes you think about creating a useful source of information as opposed to a random selection of feeds you encounter.

Articles

What does an article in a news feed contain?

• A headline
• The date and time the article was published
• The author
• Either the full content of the article or a "teaser" with a link to the full article

The reason some articles are incomplete is to entice you to the Web site. Most authors like to know how many readers they have, which articles get the most attention, etc. It is difficult to get this information if you can read the complete article through your news reader. It is also difficult to expose you to other Web site content or to advertising, which funds some blogs.

Types of news feeds

So far, I have avoided describing the different types of news feeds. I'll mention some of the common types available in case you encounter their names. For most people, this is a problem for the news reader, not for them.

RSS is a popular type of news feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Several different versions are available, but good news readers handle all of them.

The other common format is called Atom, which provides some improvements over RSS. Again, it's best to leave to the details to the news readers, but if you have a choice of both formats, you may get better results with the latter.

Reading news feeds

Choosing the right news reader makes all the difference. Many are free and I recommend you try out different ones to see which works best for you. New ones are always appearing.

The news reader I use is called GreatNews. I like it for two reasons:

• It makes it easy to quickly skim over hundreds of articles
• It's display captures a bit of the "newspaper" experience

Some other popular news readers I have heard about are Bloglines and NewsGator. Have something you like better? Send me a note and tell me why.

A quick guide to GreatNews

Here's what a typical GreatNews window looks like. In this example, I am displaying just the content pane. There are several different styles you can use. This one is called the "newspaper" style:

For an alternative view, I've made all three GreatNews panes visible. The side pane shows your subscriptions, organized within folders. The top pane shows just headlines—you can use it for quickly skimming through a lot of articles.

The main question I had when I started using news feeds was: how do I subscribe to a feed? What exactly do I do with the symbol I see on so many sites.

To subscribe to a feed from Firefox, use the Options menu and select the Feeds tab. Select GreatNews as the feed reader. From then on, if you click on a feed icon, GreatNews will automatically start and add the new feed to its list.

In IE7, it's just a little harder. Bring up GreatNews and click on the Add News Feed icon on the tool bar. Copy the URL of the page displaying the feed icon into the Feed URL field of the dialog GreatNews displays and select Next. GreatNews will examine the page and locate the feed(s) it contains. In other words, while some news readers need to be told exactly where to find the feed, GreatNews just needs to know the Web page which the feed symbol; it will the exact location of the feed on its own.

Try it, you'll like it

People who use news readers would find it hard to live without one. But many people are reluctant to use news feeds—they imagine it as something mysterious, difficult to learn and use and of doubtful value. I hope this article has helped clarify the benefits of news feeds and enticed you to create your personal newspaper.