How do I follow a blog? What does “subscribe” mean? What is RSS? What is a reader? Why should I care? If you have asked yourself any of these questions, then read on. If you are more web savvy, then read on anyhow and add your two cents in the comments.
I am a member of a variety of groups and meet regularly with fellow bloggers, marketers, sustainability experts and more. Sometimes it is purely a social event over a few beers, and sometimes I get down and dirty with technical aspects of the net or green technologies. Whenever I mention our blog, I invariably get a few questions. If you have ever wanted to ask any of the above questions, then you are not alone. I thought I would answer some of these questions here and demystify some of the process for you.
How do I follow a blog? Let’s start here. A blog is like an online paper. It can range from a big service that reports daily news with lots of articles, to a crazy person who rants and raves on a variety of topics whenever they are so inclined. We strive to fall somewhere in the middle. With the rise of the internet and services like Blogspot, WordPress, and even Tumblr anyone with internet access can become a blogger and put their own thoughts out to the world. Following a blog means that you read their articles or posts whenever they put new information out. To follow a blog, you can bookmark their site and visit it on a regular basis. Some sites allow you to subscribe. Subscribe means that you get the information delivered to you. Just like getting a newspaper delivered to your front porch instead of picking it up at the newsstand, subscribing to a blog allows the information to come to you in a way that is easy for you. You can subscribe by email (if that option is available) and have an email of new posts delivered right to your email account. You can also subscribe to a blog in a reader.
What is a reader? A reader is a service that goes out onto the internet and looks for new articles for you. A reader goes to any blog thats that you have subscribed to and sees if there is any new articles or posts that you have not gotten yet. If there is, then they bring the content to you. Some email programs, like Outlook have a reader built right in. There are also plenty of other reader services out there on the web. With names like News Gator, Google Reader, Net Vibes and even My Yahoo, you can sign up and these services will put all new content together for you. A reader or reader service allows you to follow more than one blog at a time and makes it easy for you to read new content. When you subscribe to a variety of blogs, then these services will go out onto the web, find all new content for the blogs that you choose and put it all in one place for you. For example, after you subscribe to our blog and a few others, when you go to your reader you will find new articles from Great Lakes Green Pages, Green LA Girl, Tree Hugger, or whatever blogs you subscribe to all in that reader. You no longer have to go out to each individual site to read each of these blogs. If there is no new post since you checked last, then there will be nothing in your reader. Blogs do this by using RSS.
What is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. When a blog starts publishing on a regular basis, they generally add an RSS feed. This is like a newswire service (think UPI) for blogs. It sends tells where the blog is and what the latest content is. Blog readers use this feed to check for new content. When you subscribe to blogs using a reader, the reader adds these feed “addresses” to their list of places to check and checks for you to see if anything new has been published. When you see the symbol on the left you can generally click on it and subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed.
Why should you care? The world is a rapidly changing place. It used to be that one could get along just fine by reading the daily paper and watching the local and national news. Now to be really aware of what is happening, you have to use the internet. But sifting through all the content on the internet is a task all unto itself. Then there is interesting stuff going on that is never picked up by the news or ever put into print. I went to a great event last night called Eco Tuesday (which I will write about later) but there was no conventional press there. There were other people there who likely write blogs. When you subscribe to a blog like ours, you will be apprised of all the latest news and content that we write. In addition, you can subscribe to other blogs that you find interesting and have it all delivered together in one place. This is the future of news and information. Blogs and the internet have lead the way in breaking news and information. While CNN was reporting quiet elections in Iraq, twitter was abuzz with violence and protests that were happening in the streets. Conventional media is at the mercy of the advertisers, while bloggers are more free to produce content. So find your self a reader that you like, and start subscribing to this and a host of other blogs right now! I’ll make it easy. Click here.
Tags: blogs, RSS, Technology
A journalist for a local paper once complained to me that the imminent death of paper news sources should raise alarms for those that get their news from the Internet, since in his opinion, all Internet news is “appropriated” or downright stolen from newspapers. Although some of my blog posts were stimulated by reading a headline here and there, and I have quoted a few print-media sources from time to time, I have never taken a story directly from a newspaper.
Blogs are the new media and people like Rupert Murdoch are still in a panic to figure out a way to cash in on them. He and his fellow past-media-moguls are used to all of us clawing over each other to get the latest headline from them and now, with the buffet of blogs out there we haven’t had such an overpowering hunger for Murdoch’s fare.
All hail the rise of the Blogs!