How to Install an RSS Reader to your computer

An RSS Reader (also called aggregator) is a software program that looks an awful lot like email. Except rather than see a list of messages from people you know (and don't know/spam!), the "messages" come from blogs. Each "message" is the most recent post to a weblog. (Ergo, no spam inside your RSS Reader!)

Ok. So why would you need an RSS Reader/Aggregator? Say for example you like to read this blog. Wouldn't it be nice if every time I posted something new I could alert you so that you wouldn't have to manually come back here to see if I've added or changed a post? Well, SharpReader (a free RSS program) does this. As long as you "subscribe" to my blog from inside Sharpreader, SharpReader will scan the blogosphere and bring back any new post to a weblog you've subscribed to.

You see it on the SharpReader screen as a "headline" which looks a lot like a subject from an email. If the headline grabs you, you can click on it and continue reading. You can set up the RSS Reader to scan every X minutes, or you can manually select Refresh.

Many people use RSS to subscribe to news feeds. For example, Wired magazine keeps a blog, if you will. (It's actually an xml feed that lets your RSS reader pick it up, because that's all an RSS Reader picks up is xml, but that's getting technical). All you need to know is that you can have a list of personalized and always current information at your fingertips by subscribing to feeds that interest you. So, if you like Wired magazine, you might like their RSS feed. Or, maybe subscribing to a daily Dilbert cartoon, or a daily motivational quote, or word appeals to you. Maybe a BBC news feed or the daily front page of the Christian Science Monitor. And many, many more websites and blogs and news sites are adding RSS feeds every day, so the world of options is growing.

If I didn't do a good job explaining RSS, the Boston Globe does a better job at it.

And if you still don't get it, don't fret...it's a hard concept to capture. See if this analogy works for you. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Syndication is referring to the same syndication concept as it's used in the newspaper or television industry. For example, AP syndicates their new stories to any "subscriber" (e.g., the New York Times, or your town newspaper). Every day (or probably more often), AP sends their subscribers major headlines. If any headline grabs a certain editor's attention, the editor will use it. So, an RSS Reader on your computer does this for you. You subscribe to feeds you are interested in and your RSS Reader will display the latest headlines. Except all of this is open source (i.e. free downloadable software).