Web News Feeds: Feed Your Head

The Internet has never been short of new buzz words as newer technology emerges.  One of the latest things to take shape on the net is News Feeds.  News Feeds are a great way to keep up to date with your favorite web sites and Blogs, watch news headlines or check out the latest sports scores.  Basically a feed sends an alert when new content is added to a website, you check what the latest headline is and can click in to read the full update or story.

More and more web sites are offering feeds; you may have noticed a little orange square with a white radio waves icon on some of the sites you visit.  This has been adopted as the universal symbol for News Feeds, but you may also see an orange rectangle labeled as RSS, XML or Atom in white text, these also mean that there is a News Feed available.   

Getting Fed

There are several ways to “Subscribe” or get updates from a news feed.  The first is via stand alone news feed reader.  Having to launch yet another program besides your Web Browser and e-mail program is less than appealing.  Luckily, web browser and e-mail program creators feel the same way and have started to incorporate News Feed reading capability right into those programs.  Internet Explorer 7 will have News Feed features built right in. You can download the beta pre-release version now from Microsoft. (http://www.microsoft.com).  The current version of the Mozilla Firefox browser (http://www.mozilla.org) has a built in News Feed feature called “live bookmarks”.

The best way to get your news feeds currently is via a browser plug-in.  Internet Explorer 6 users can try the Attensa plug-in (http://www.attensa.com) and I recommend the Sage extension for Mozilla Firefox (http://sage.mozdev.org).

Another good way to view feeds is through customizable home page portals that the major internet players are starting to offer.  Google was the first to come out with this type of service (http://www.google.com/ig).  The site lets you pick from general feeds like updates from CNN or the Weather Channel with your local weather and also lets you add your favorite Blogs or other sites that offer RSS News Feeds.  The google/IG page can be set up so that right next to the national news is a feed from our local WNEP Channel 16.

Podcasts and Broadcatching

News Feeds are also being used by user-created Internet radio shows called Podcasts (named after Apple Computers popular iPod MP3 audio player).  When a new show is available the news feed is updated and alerts everyone interested, along with the actual audio file available for download.

Broadcatching is using a Peer-to-Peer BitTorrent file sharing client with built-in RSS News Feed support to automatically download television episodes as they are released. Internet users capture the broadcast as it is transmitted, then compress it (typically after removing commercials) and send it on to others.  Broadcatching is a great way to get a favorite show you missed if you have a high speed connection and don’t have Tivo.

Won’t Go Back

Once you get used to using news feeds, you won’t go back to wasting your time in clicking your bookmarked favorite sites every so often to check for updates; no more refreshing your browser to check college hoops scores.  By using a RSS News Feed you’ll know right away.

Author: Jesse Torok