How+Can+You+Use+Feeds

The information contained in the RSS feed is accessed by a piece of software called an aggregator. The aggregator holds a list of web sites and resources that offer RSS feeds. When it’s opened the aggregator retrieves the information from each RSS feed page listed. The aggregator may be a desktop application, a browser or mail application extension, or web-based, some of them are commercial products and others are freeware. A few applications already have aggregators built into them – Apple’s Safari browser, Opera Web Browser, Internet Explorer 7(beta) and there are rumours that the next version of Microsoft Outlook will support feeds as well. The following is a list of free aggregators: [|Bloglines] [|NewsIsFree] [|Newsgator] [|Fuzzy Duck] [|FeedReader] [|CITA RSS Aggregator] [|Vienna (Mac OS)] [|Wizz RSS (Firefox)] [|My RSS Toolbar (Internet Explorer)] [|Attensa (Outlook)] Another excellent listing of the different types of aggregators is found on [|Wikipedia]. Many people use RSS feeds as a way to keep current on topics that are of interest to them. Rather than checking every web site they have found that relates to that topic, they subscribe to the RSS feeds for those web sites. When something new is posted to any of those sites, they will get the new information with the date of the posting, whether as a full article or as a title and summary with a link to follow for the complete article. The feed aggregator monitors the feed twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred and sixty-five days a year. Subscribing to RSS feeds saves the time of checking every single site that you access to find out if they have posted anything new. For the most part these feeds are ad free, but advertising services like Google Adsense are starting to take advantage of RSS feeds by offering embedded targeted ads in the feeds of the content providers. There is an interesting twist to this, because the ads are in XML and easily identified, so some aggregators will block these ads. (NewsFire - [|http://www.newsfireRSS.com/] for Macs and CITA RSS Aggregator - http://www.seeita.com/RSSA/ for Windows) Feeds can also be manipulated in a variety of ways. One example is the use of server-side or client-side scripts so you can quickly format and republish information from other websites on to your own website. One such example is Feed2JS (http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/index.php). This tool was created by Alan Levine at Maricopa Community College, where you can enter a feed, format it they way you would like it to appear on your website, and then you are given a bit of JavaScript code which you place on your website. When the feed is updated the content on your website is automatically updated. Online web applications like Phone Feeds http://www.phonefeeds.com/, My Yahoo! Mobile RSS http://mobile.yahoo.com/ and Lite Feeds http://www.litefeeds.com/ make it easy to reformat RSS feeds for use in mobile devices like a PDA, Blackberry or mobile phone. Get your feeds over any type of internet connection. There is even a service called Feed Beep http://feedbeep.com/ that will send SMS alerts to your phone or pager when feeds are updated. Another feature of RSS is that it contains strictly content from web sites; it removes the eye candy that encompasses many web sites today. You will not see web site templates downloaded within an RSS feed, only the content that the web site is providing. A nice feature of some aggregator is the ability to create your own template and pull the web site content from your feeds into it. Now that is what I call web content customizability. You can see how this is literally changing the face of the World Wide Web.
 * Web-Based Aggregators**
 * Desktop Aggregator**
 * Extensions and Toolbars**