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Tired of those emails from government officials in various African countries? Still want to keep up with the IEEE electronically? On solution may be our RSS feed. RSS stands for Resource Description Format (RDF) Site Summary (RSS), although you will find a lot of other interpretations such as Rich Site Summary. For those of you who are really interested, the specifications are available at web.resource.org/rss/1.0 .
For the rest of us, what RSS provides is a cross between newsgroups and PointCast. The RSS reader looks a lot like a Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) reader. Instead of users posting to newsgroups, web site owners publish short summaries of their latest news with links to the full story. The user subscribes only to the sites he or she wants to monitor.
You can find a huge selection of readers, but FeedReader (www.feedreader.com) is free and works quite well. Another good reader is SharpReader (www.sharpreader.net). OS X users will enjoy Vienna (www.vienna-rss.org).
After you download your RSS Feed Reader, subscribe to our blog feed ( ieeehamptonroads.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default). Each time the blog is updated, the change is recorded in this summary file. When the file changes, the reader will alert you. But the really good news is that you can use the same tool to monitor hundreds of web sites. Your reader will come with a number of very useful news aggregation sites. These sites monitor groups of sites and report their findings to a single file. Many of these news aggregation sites are fed automatically and even allow you to query a dynamic RSS feed using key words and Boolean logic. A comprehensive list of news feeds is available at www.syndic8.com.
I work for the Federal Government and I used to have wait weeks for my industry rags to mature in the mailroom before they were delivered to me. Now I read the latest industry news on-line long before the paper versions show up on my desk. Maybe your local computer Nazi's won't let you load any software on your computer but you would still like to monitor a news aggregation service. What is a fellow to do? Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) provides a web based interface. Many other sites such a Google and Yahoo also offer web based interfaces. I actually prefer these web based solutions to an local application. You do need to consider the privacy issues they may introduce.