See that orange box over on the right hand side of the screen under the heading “Add Us to Your RSS Reader”? If you click the orange box you can “Subscribe to my Feed.” But just what exactly is it for?

First, let’s explain a feed. A feed is a list of all the postings on your blog… and it is automatically updated when you make a post.

Feeds are used by feed readers. A feed reader is a special kind of software that lists all the different feeds you have subscribed to and the individual blog posts. A feed reader saves you a lot of time because you don’t have to visit every blog to see if it has been updated… it automatically looks for and lists new content for you in your own “personal newspaper” format.

My favorite feed reader is the Google Reader because you can get to your feeds from any computer on the Internet. Just log in to your Google account to get to your specific feeds. It also lets you sort your feeds into folders and makes it really easy to read through a lot of feeds quickly (you can watch how one top blogger, Robert Scoble, reads 622 feeds every morning). It’s also easy to add feeds to the reader… most blogs that have the orange box will also have a button that says “Subscribe with Google.” Click it and the feed is automatically added to your Google reader.

By the way RSS (which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is the technical part of the feed that makes it all work in the background for you.

I also love an RSS reader because it’s so much easier than having to delete email! Rather than getting email updates and having to delete each new message, you can just see the post in your reader.

So go visit Google, set up your reader, and make sure you put Your Blog Team at the top of your feeds!

Last Modified : August 12th, 2007 Filed under : Glossary Navigate : Previous post / Next post