Lesson Overview

Objectives

After completing this lesson you will be able to:

• Define feed reader (or news aggregator)
• Describe the purpose of a feed reader
• Create an account with the free feed reader Bloglines
• Use three different methods with Bloglines to subscribe to blogs and other content feeds
  
  Estimated time to complete this entire lesson: 10 minutes
  Prerequisite skills: Basic Web Surfing Knowledge
  Technology needed: Flash 6.0 or higher to view animations

Introduction

Blogs are updated inconsistently based on an author's whims. Some blogs are updated multiple times a day while others might only get updated once a week or less (note: frequency does not always equal quality). Once you start reading blogs, you will discover and uncover many you like to read. Unless you want to check each one everyday, you will probably want what is called a feed reader or news aggregator.

A feed reader is a tool that lets you subscribe to many blogs, news websites, and a growing number of other content sources on the web (e.g. some photograph sites). When you subscribe to a site with a feed reader, you are notified whenever a site is updated. When a site has been updated, the feed reader displays a quick synopsis of what has changed. This is much easier than having to check each site everyday for new content. Since many “regular” (e.g. CNN.com) sites are now adding the same blog technology to allow subscribing, feed readers can change your web surfing habits.

How does a feed reader change your surfing habits? By allowing you to scan 50+ sites in a matter of minutes and see whether the sites that have changed contain information relevant to you, the efficiency and personalization of using the web expands dramatically. There are some other possibilities that are very exciting about these tools related to education but, for now, let's just get started!