You probably noticed that my blog has a link "Syndicate this site (XML)"". What's that? I finally understood what having a syndicated version of my blog in XML (a.k.a. RSS feed) was used for. I can be slow-minded sometimes, I know.

A RSS Feed is a standardized XML version of a blog or a news site. It is used by many news portals like yahoo news. The good thing with RSS feeds is that you can use a RSS feed aggregator to centralize a set of feeds you are interested in. If you frequently read John Smith's blog, yahoo international news and the latest news about the Zimbabwe Cricket championship, thanks to the aggregator you can have a place where all this information is gathered (assuming that the websites that displays the information you are interested in support a RSS version of their entries...)

A feed aggregator can be a plugin for mozilla or outlook, a stand-alone software that runs in the background and notifies you when a new entry is posted or a centralized web page (server-side aggregator). In all the cases, the aggregator takes care of downloading the RSS feeds and displays the headlines to you. One click and you can access right away to articles you did not read yet, no need to check individually all the blogs, news sites you may be following.

I am using MyYahoo as an aggregator and I have on my yahoo main page a mix of blog headlines, business, international news headlines, etc... The great thing is that all is configurable to your needs:

Anyways that's great. You did not understand a word of what I just said? Doesn't matter, as I said, it is a geek stuff.