Blogs - More than Meets the Eye

A blog is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. If that was all there was to it, then I wouldn't be writing this in a blog right now. But I am, and here are a few reasons why.

- blogs are cheap
- blogs require almost no technical knowledge to set up
- blogs have a permission system to control who can post or comment

There is another less obvious reason. Most blogs, including this one, publish web feeds, also known as RSS feeds. Web feeds deliver new content directly to you as soon as it is published online. Not all browsers are able to display feeds but Safari and Firefox can. If you're using either of these browsers right now, click on the Site Feed link and see what happens.

Notice that the site feed displays what's new in the blog. 'Yes, but I could see that anyway in the blog', I hear you say doubtfully.

Here's the cool part. Imagine that there are 20 blogs that you follow. This is not as unlikely as it may seem; blogs are becoming an important and valid source of information. If you bookmark all 20 blogs, Safari is able to aggregate all 20 feeds into a single web page. In other words, you don't have to visit 20 different blogs to discover what's new; you just use Safari to aggregate all 20 feeds. Here's how.

- From the Safari menu, select Bookmarks > Add Bookmark Folder
- Create a bookmark folder. Name it something like 'Blog Feeds'.
- Navigate to a blog and look for its web feed link. They often appear as buttons like these: .
- Click the blog's web feed link and Bookmark it, saving it into the bookmark folder that you've just created. Repeat this process for all the blogs that you wish to monitor.
- From the Safari menu, select Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks. Control-click the desired folder and choose View All RSS Articles.

'OK', you say, 'but I don't have 20 blogs right now that I follow'. Fair enough. But are there several news sources that you follow? Did you know that many web sites, especially news organisations, publish web feeds these days? For example, here's one for the BBC: . Click it and see for yourself! Follow the same bookmarking procedure as described above in order to aggregate news updates from your favourite sources into a single page.

Finally, there is one disadvantage of using your Safari bookmarks to aggregate web feeds; you're reliant on your own computer. There are alternative web-based aggregators that you can access using any web connected computer. One of the most popular is Bloglines.com. Here's what Will Richardson says in 'RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators" which you can find at www.weblogg-ed.com:

"the main advantage to Bloglines is that you can access it from anywhere you have an Internet connection. In other words, you don’t have to be on your own computer(s) with special software installed to read your news."