About Feeds
Many websites have links labeled "XML" or "RSS"
or "Atom". All of these are ways of saying that you can
find out about updates to that site without having to browse
to it yourself to check.
This feature is referred to as Syndication or Aggregation, or sometimes
it's just called Subscribing. On some sites, instead of a link,
they'll have an orange button that says RSS or XML, and looks a
lot like this: 
That's a sign that the page you're viewing has a feed available.
Getting Started
Who Publishes Feeds?
Anyone that publishes on the web can publish a feed. Blogs (or
weblogs) were one of the first types of sites to offer feeds. But
major newspapers and news websites, hobbyist sites, and even retailers
like Amazon.com all offer feeds, too.
What Do I Need?
Just like when you want to watch a video clip or listen to music
on the web, you need a "player" of some kind to subscribe
to feeds. The good news is, there are number of these tools available,
and many of them are either totally free or free to try out.
The "player" for a feed is called a feed reader. (Or
sometimes it's called a news reader or RSS reader or RSS client.
All these terms mean the same thing.) This tool lets you subscribe
to any feeds you want, checks automatically to see when they're
updated, and then displays the updates for you as they arrive.
Feed readers come in two varieties: web-based, or as an installable
program. If you use one of the web-based readers, you can access
your feeds from anywhere you go, just by signing into the website
that manages your feeds. If you use a feed reading program that
installs on your computer, your feeds can be stored for you even
if you're not connected to the Internet.
What Feed Reader Should I Use?
For web-based feed readers, many people choose Bloglines
or NewsGator
on-line, both of which are free services designed specifically
for reading feeds. My
Yahoo! allows you to subscribe to feeds and have them display
within your custom page as well.
If you prefer a feed reading program that you can install on your
computer, you can use FeedDemon
or NewsGator
for Microsoft Outlook if you're on Microsoft Windows. Both tools
are made by the same company as NewsGator on-line, so you can switch
between these programs and the web-based reader at any time. If
you're on a Macintosh running OS X, the most popular feed reader
is NetNewsWire,
which can also connect to the web-based services.
Mac users can also use the built-in support for feeds in the Safari
web browser in OS X 10.4, and Microsoft Windows users will have
support for feeds in the upcoming version 7 of Internet Explorer.
Anyone using the Mozilla
Firefox web browser has support for feeds built-in, as well.
Subscribing to Feeds
Once you've got a tool to read feeds, you'll want to find some
feeds worth reading. Many of the tools listed above provide some
built-in feeds to get you started. Then, as you visit other sites
on the web, you can keep your eyes open for links that say XML or
RSS or Syndication, or for that orange button up above, and add
the feeds you find interesting.
Technical Details
What Is an XML Feed?
Despite the geeky technical names, feeds are very simple. They're
just small files, much like a web page. Feeds have a special format
that lets you collect information from a wide variety of sites and
display the updates all in one place, as they happen.
Most feeds are offered for free, to encourage you to read the site
that publishes them, or so you'll click on the links in the feed.
Almost any information that's updated regularly is a good candidate
for being offered as a feed.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and Atom is
just a name, not an acronym.
What's the Difference Between the Various Formats?
For a regular person reading feeds, the various versions of RSS
and Atom should offer similar experiences. At a technical level,
RSS is focused on making simple syndication very easy, and is the
older and more widely-published format. Atom is a web standard from
the IETF, one of the standards bodies that's helped define the web,
and is more focused on enabling both reading and writing of content
with a single format.
What is Podcasting?
Podcasting is the popular name for using special types of feeds
to distribute media files like songs, audio files, or even video.
Feed readers that support podcasting will automatically download
the media files in a podcast feed and then copy them to a portable
device or to your computer for you to listen to whenever you want.
Many people listen to podcast audio files on an Apple iPod, which
inspired the name. But podcasting can be any kind of file on any
kind of device, delivered by subscribing to a feed.
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