CT Biz Blogs

How do people keep up with all these blogging conversations going on all over the place? That’s where webfeeds come in. Also called RSS or syndication, webfeeds represent a convenient way to:

• gather a list of the blogs you’d like to read regularly.
• be notified when new blog posts are created.
• read the new posts in one place.

Without webfeeds, the amount of activity in the “blogosphere” would be impossible to keep up with. Well, it is already impossible to totally keep up with, although some bloggers come close — monitoring over 400 blogs daily.

How they do it, has been cogently explained in detail by Amy Gahran, on her blog, Contentious. I won’t try to duplicate that feat here, but instead urge you to go read her excellent series of tutorials on this subject.

But if you’re looking for a quick, short explanation, here it is. RSS, or webfeeds, are regularly updated files which organize posts for reading in a feed reader. A feed reader is an online or desktop application which organizes and displays new posts from feeds to which you are subscribed.

The beauty of feed readers is that you don’t have to pay attention to any blog which doesn’t contain a new post. This allows you to monitor many more blogs than you would have time to visit individually.

For an example, check out my webfeed subscriptions. This leads to the list of feeds I monitor daily with Bloglines. Bloglines is a free web-based webfeed reader, which allows me to keep all my feeds in one place. The one thing you won’t see is how the updated blogs are in a bold typeface, so I can review only those. You’ll have to subscribe to your own feeds to see that.

And you can use RSS for more than blogs — if you look under my news folder, you’ll see that I have subscribed to two RSS feeds from the Hartford Courant. More and more newspapers, web search sites, and others are creating RSS feeds. What a deal!

Finding a feed link on a blog can get confusing because there are so many different formats. You might see an orange RSS icon, or XML icon. On this blog, you’ll find the feed by scrolling down to “Other,” in the left sidebar. This link is not meant to be read, but rather, to be passed on to your feed reader to be added to your subscriptions. The good news about many feed readers is that most times you don’t even need that. With Bloglines, for example, all you need to do is type or copy the web address (URL) of the weblog into the subscribe form. It’s a snap, really.

When you enter into a conversation, you have to remember that you’re not the only one talking. So go out and start reading blogs, subscribing, and adding your comments to the party already in progress.