Introducing RSS
Take a moment to think about the different web content you regularly use; news, blogs, searches, favourite sites and more… As you’ve no doubt discovered, checking for new content on a large number of sites can quickly become very time consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get new information from all your favourite sites to come to you? Well using RSS feeds you can.
RSS feeds are fast becoming a standard way of distributing content on the web. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a way of enabling your computer to automatically search nominated sites for updated content. So you can have the latest information without spending hours searching for it.
What kind of content can I get?
You can get a variety of content via RSS feeds. Blogs and news updates commonly provide RSS feeds but many websites and search engines now include an option for an RSS feed. In fact any reularly updated content including podcasts, blogs, video blogs (vlogs)  and some websites offer RSS feeds. Just look for the little orange icon that indicates a feed is offered. 
At UNE, blogs blog.une.edu.au the UNE news service and forums (https://forum.une.edu.au) provide RSS feeds. RSS feeds are set to become a more common means of accessing content at UNE.
How does it work?
You will need an RSS reader to enable your computer to ‘pull’ content to your computer. RSS readers are sometimes called news aggregators or just aggregators. Many web browsers such as Firefox (Mac and PC) and Safari (Mac) come with aggregators built in. RSS readers are also available as simple programs that collect, read and organise the content made available in RSS feeds. Recently portal sites and search engines such as Google have begun to incorporate RSS readers making it easy to access content on any computer.
If you want to download a reader there are lots to choose from and many are free. Readers are easy to find but here are a couple of links to reader lists:
http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreaders/tp/windows_free.htm
http://email.about.com/od/rssreadersmac/Mac_RSS_Feed_Readers_News_Aggregators.htm
Once you’ve chosen a reader you can subscribe to the feeds you are interested in. It’s a bit like subscribing to a magazine - once yo’ve subscribed, your RSS reader will automatically check for new content from those sites. Information is provided in headline form allowing you to follow up on only the content that interests you.