Once you spend some time reading blogs you will see this curious orange symbol all over the place. This symbol indicates an RSS feed is available. What this means is that whenever this web site is updated a “feed” is generated notifying the outside world of the update. This is really useful because it means you don’t have to go to the blog’s web site to see if it has been updated. The new updates come to you.
The best way to gather all these feeds together is in an RSS reader. The most popular reader is the Google Reader which is what I use, but there are plenty of other alternative such as Bloglines, Pageflakes, Newsgator or My Yahoo. Take a look at the Subscribe button at the top of the right column here. If you hover your mouse over it you will see a bunch of different options appear. These are the various different ways you can capture the RSS feed of this site.
Think of an RSS Reader as a 21st century newspaper (without the dirty fingers). You can gather updates from the blogs that interest you in the one place. You can create different categories such as a News, Business and Sports section just like a real newspaper. You can even get a local weather report delivered into your reader every day. But an RSS reader can be so much more than just a news aggregator. You can also setup Google alerts, Twitter searches, and many other kinds of searches to come into your reader as well. More on that another day.
Suffice it to say, if you write a small business blog, you need to be using an RSS reader. It is the number one tool for any serious blogger.
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