RSS: Don't search -- have things come to you

Above: my Bloglines site this morning, with the sites I am currently tracking on the left

RSS (or "Real Simple Syndication") is one of the ways in which we can have information come to us, rather than have to go to places like Google to search for it.

Basically, you use what is called a "news aggregator" to go off to the sites you are interested in (blogs and an increasingly large number of websites) and then alert you, on a single page (see image above) if it finds new content on the sites it has trawled.

There are a number of possible choices, with Bloglines being the one I use personally, and can recommend.

You can pick and choose which sites you want, can subscribe and unsubscribe easily, and have a variety of options such as seeing just the headlines, summaries (my setting on the BBC Learning English site you can see on the right of the image above) or the whole articles.

Learn more
There is an excellent introduction, RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators, from the (also excellent) Weblogg-ed site.