RSS for the rest of us
Are you one of the many folks out there who wonder what RSS is and why anyone would care? Take a look at this plain-spoken presentation on RSS at Common Craft.
Many of the most popular RSS feed readers available are mentioned; one he doesn’t mention is the one I use and which I recommend: NetVibes. You can get NetVibes here.
Having an RSS feed on your blog or news site is a great way to increase the traffic and visibility of your site, by making it easy for both search engines and human readers to keep up with new postings.
My favorite way to get RSS is the Thunderbird email client made by the folks who brought us Firefox. The major benefits to this approach are:
Since I always have email open I don’t have to open yet another application or go to a special website to get my feeds.
Although the feeds are in a separate folder, Thunderbird treats them exactly like email; feeds with new content are bold, as are articles I haven’t looked at yet. This is a convention I’m used to, and it gives me the same sense of accomplishment when I’ve read or decided not to read all of the new articles.
Thunderbird dings when the feeds are updated (if there is anything new). Yeah, it can be distracting, but it appeals to me none the less.
It’s tough to get people to switch email clients, and I doubt even the prospect of an embedded RSS reader will convince many people to do so, but… I don’t believe RSS will really take off until all of the email clients start including it(which I’m pretty sure they will).
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/