The quickest way to see what really simple syndication is all about is to sign up for the two best free online RSS aggregators, My Yahoo! and Bloglines. I advise that you have both. I would not do without either one.
My Yahoo!
If you do not already have a My Yahoo! account you can sign up for free. Then log in to your account and customize it as you please. My Yahoo! comes set up with some standard news feeds which you can keep or not. It also provides other useful resources and information.
Bloglines
Even if you are satisfied with My Yahoo!, you really need to sign up for Bloglines as well. The two services complement one another. I use Bloglines most of the time. Bloglines provides an amazing list of features, services and support including free services for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing RSS feeds, news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content.
The advantage of using an online aggregator such as Bloglines is that you can access it anywhere and not be dependent on software installed on your computer at home. Another advantage is that it makes it easy to find the feeds you want. A technical advantage is that it acts as a cache for feeds so that the feeds are displayed faster.
One of the special features of Bloglines that I really like is that you can create an unlimited number of special Bloglines email addresses. This is great for signing up for newsletters and other subscriptions. Instead of trying to make sense of your regular email inbox every day, your newsletter subscriptions will be neatly organized for you. If you want to cancel the newsletter, all you have to do is to delete that Bloglines email address.
The nice thing about Bloglines email is that there is no spam scanning and blocking of newsletters to which you subscribe. So you do not have to worry about whitelists and blacklists and not knowing whether you missed something because your email provider decided you should not see it. When you sign up for some newsletters, they tell you that you cannot use the majority of the free email services. I have not seen anyone restrict the usage of Bloglines email addresses. I do not see why anyone would because the service allows their newsletters to go through without blocking.
If you want to avoid the headaches of choosing and installing aggregator software on you computer, the online aggregator services are the way to go. Once you get started with My Yahoo! and Bloglines, you may not even see the need for installing aggregator software on your computer.
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