By Bill Bennett
Usually, you have to go looking for information on the internet. With RSS (really simple syndication), it comes to you. It's a modern take on an old idea: in the late '90s automatic information delivery was known as "push" technology.
Microsoft was so taken with push that it built its own version into Windows 98, known as active channels. Users could choose which channels to receive and automatically display them on their Windows 98 active desktop.
Push channels were mainly news feeds from large media organisations. Information providers needed to invest in fairly sophisticated, read expensive, infrastructure to broadcast feeds this way.
Large media organisations use RSS, for example you can subscribe to The Sydney Morning Herald's RSS feed. However, it's possible to send out RSS feeds to subscribers with almost no infrastructure, which means individuals can also use RSS. It's not hard and it's popular with bloggers who use RSS to let people know when they post new content. Blogging services generally have built-in RSS publishing tools.
You can read RSS feeds in the FireFox web browser (www.firefox.com) and Microsoft promises the next version of IE will read them. Firefox calls its RSS feeds live bookmarks. An icon appears in the bottom left of the screen when a website can send RSS. Clicking on this icon bookmarks the page. When you look at the bookmark, you'll find a submenu listing that page's current RSS headlines.
Firefox's live bookmarks work, but specialist RSS reader programs, sometimes called aggregators, make it even easier. Most RSS readers are free and there's a huge choice - as many as 25 different programs. Some work with your email software, others are web-based programs. Some are stand-alone applications.
Feedreader is one of the better stand-alone readers. It's simple but like a lot of free software there's not much help. You load in feeds as addresses or links from websites, then you can browse through headlines. Clicking on a headline brings up the news story in an embedded browser window.
So, the next time you want to check whether there's any fresh material on your favourite sites, you can let Feedreader do the hard work and collect the headlines for you.