RSS Feeds and Aggregators

It's amazing that the popularity of RSS is still mostly restricted to techies and high school bloggers. Don't believe me? Ask your mom. What this probably means is that there is a large surge yet to come as aggregators are built into apps that people use on a daily basis like Outlook, or a dedicated feature of MSIE). Or maybe the status quo folks are happiest reading from pre-formatted websites. When a friend asked about RSS, I put together a quick list of sites to get started.

What is RSS? In a nutshell, RSS gives you the ability to build your own daily newspaper. Using either a piece of software or a website called an Aggregator, you select the news sources you want to read, and the aggregator automatically brings it to you whenever something new is published. News agencies, magazines, webloggers (aka bloggers), and many companies now make content available through RSS newsfeeds.

The coolest new thing to happen with RSS is Podcasting. Rather than a newspaper metaphor, podcasting is more like a subscription to an audio magazine; new audio programs show up on your computer or iPod as they are created. It's only a matter of time before the same happens for video.

News Aggregators
http://blogspace.com/rss/readers
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/directory/5/aggregators 

RSS Feed Directories
http://www.completerss.com/
http://www.reuters.com/newsrss.jhtml
http://www.wired.com/news/rss
http://news.yahoo.com/rss/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/rss/front.htm
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/RSS_FEEDS?SITE=APWEB&SECTION=HOME
http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs

Search RSS Feeds
http://www.blogdigger.com/

Start your own weblog
http://spaces.msn.com/ 
http://www.bloglines.com/ 

Host your own weblog
http://communityserver.org/ 
http://www.dasblog.net/ 

[2005-03-21 Added a "What is RSS" section for Jim Martin's Mom and the bit on Podcasting.]