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Keeping up to speed with breaking news
Updated and revised: 30 December 2008
If you want to be the first in your office to know the latest news, or if your job involves responding to current events, you will probably need an efficient way of staying informed via your PC.
What is it?
RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and is a way of subscribing to websites which change their content frequently, such as news sites or weblogs. That way you are notified when the site changes, instead of having to remember to go the site regularly.
RSS was originally used by blogs and the ease with which people could spot when their favourite blogs were updated contributed greatly to the growth in blog publishing. News sites eventually realised that the same principles applied to them, and now there are few news/current affairs that do not offer a feed.
Most modern browsers let you set up a bookmark for a particular site's RSS feed using your browser. When the browser finds new material at the site you have bookmarked it will list it in a pull-down menu and you can navigate to it by clicking on it.
Do you need it?
If you access a lot of news sites and need to find information quickly, then yes! RSS allows you to view the current headlines on a site at a single glance. This means you could save a lot of time and frustration.
How do you get it?
If you use Firefox as your Internet browser, then it couldn't be more simple. On any site which has an RSS feed, you will see a little orange and white box appear in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.
The box
looks like this: 
If you click on it, it will give you the option to subscribe to the feed for that site. RSS feeds in Firefox are known as 'Live Bookmarks' or 'Livemarks'.
If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, you will need to install a browser plugin to manage live bookmarks. A list is available at http://allrss.com/rssreaders.html
You can also access RSS feeds by using an ‘aggregator’, also called a feed reader or news reader. This is software or a web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and video logs in a single location for easy viewing.
There are two types - desktop aggregators are programs that you download and install, while online web-based aggregators let you subscribe to a number of RSS feeds and then see them all on a website.
You can find a list of both types of aggregator here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregators
CD/BT December 2008
Originally added: September 2005
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