The fundamental idea of web feed reading is to make it easier to keep up with multiple websites\u00a0without having to surf to each one looking for new content.<\/p>\n
For instance, I am interested in cooking, including baking. There are scores of interesting sites with information about baking: recipes, discussion, news, etc. I could make bookmarks for each of those sites (which I still do, to get all the nice utility discussed in the unit on Diigo and social bookmarking) and then try to regularly surf to each one to see if something is new (which I don’t do).<\/p>\n
The problem with the bookmark and surf method is an amount of time I spend going to each site and waiting for it to load, only to discover, more often than not, that there’s nothing new. And if there is, it can be hard to easily and quickly find that which is of interest to me.<\/p>\n
Feed reading gives me the ability to\u00a0subscribe\u00a0to the sites I like to read and read them using a single client the way I read email– with notification of what is new and a simple interface for quickly finding what is relevant and interesting to me… and no reason to look at sites which haven’t been updated since the last time I read them.<\/p>\n
Watch the following video to learn more about RSS feeds… remember that, for our purposes, Atom feeds work exactly the same way!<\/p>\n