Many different RSS aggregators are now surfacing, with some free or beta products (such as newzcrawler and blogbrowser) available for download.
"Come again?" I hear you say.
First of all, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary (well, what it stands for is debatable, but that's the version I use). An RSS page can be used for a site that's regularly updated, and it provides a summary of the site's recent entries, or headlines, or whatever.
A lot of news sites have an RSS page, which is a coded summary of that site's headlines, but many blogs use them too -- so, yeah, even mediajunk has an RSS page.
"Okay, I clicked the link, and it takes me to a page of gobbledegook."
The gobbledegook is called XML, and it doesn't matter that neither of us can understand it, so long as aggregator programmes such as newzcrawler can. What aggregators do is take the summaries of various sites, and lump them together to create a new site.
Bloghog is a good example of how a site created by an aggregator looks (although it could use a dab of webpaint!).
In theory, with an aggregator programme, you could add your favourite blogs and create one "all in one" page, that contained the headlines of the latest entries from each.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'm going to stick to adding blogs I like to my "Favourites" folder...
Comments
3 comments
I think RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. This started way back in the early days of Netscape 4, when Userland was working with them on their Channel Definition Format (CDF).
Many sites and especially most blogs render themselves as an "RSS feed" as well as in HTML. The downside is that RSS readers make all sites look the same, although most do link to the site itself. The upside is that you can monitor a lot of sites for updates very easily.
Ole
Thanks for the clarifications Ole. I suppose in theory you could personalize your RSS reader and make the blogs look how you wanted, or choose from a selection of skins?
Update: yeah, I thought I had read that the meaning of 'RSS' is contested. An article in SearchEngineWatch throws more light on the matter:
>>What does RSS stand for? There's a can of worms. RSS as introduced by Netscape in 1999 then later abandoned in 2001 stood for "Rich Site Summary." Another version of RSS pioneered by UserLand Software stands for "Really Simple Syndication." In yet another version, RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."