Internet & Society Course Blog

Services exist to help you keep track of blog updates without having to visit blogs individually all the time. You can subscribe to the feeds of Web sites.

One way to do this is to set up an account on a blog aggregator service such as Bloglines. That service will aggregate blog content on a Web site for you.

Another option is to subscribe to feed notifications that you receive on email. Two such services are RMail and RSSFwd. You tell them the feed address of the Web site of interest and your email, and they send you updates every time the site of interest is updated.
(In order to avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of email, you may want to consider adding a filter to your email program for feed notifications to be deposited in a specific folder without even showing up in your Inbox.)

A third option is to use the feed-reader capabilities of some browsers such as Firefox. Firefox gives you the option of adding Live Bookmarks to your Bookmarks list. Live Bookmarks are feeds.

Note that the use of feeds is not restricted to blogs. Many other sites now offer this option of keeping up-to-date on content. Whenever you see a “Feeds” or “RSS” graphic/link on a site, it means that you can subscribe to its content.