Follow Your Interests on the Web with RSS

You have heard of RSS, feeds, podcasts and blogs on the Internet. Lost sites have what is called an RSS feed that you can "follow" to know when new things appear. There are many great tools to keep tabs on all the things that interest you.

One of these is an RSS reader. There are two types or readers. The first is a progral you install to run on your computer. The choices depend on what platform you use, Windows, Max OS X or linux (or...). The second kind are online aggregators such as but not limited to Google Reader. Google Reader is great, has a lot of useful features and it will work offline. That's right, you can tell you are going off line and it will store up all the articles of all the feeds you subscribe to and you can read them on the train or plane during otherwise wasted hours of travel.

So far, not as many people actually use these tools as they should, but there are more geeky levels of using feeds. You can have Yahoo send you an alert daily or right when any feed is updated. The alert can be to IM, email or your cellphone. But one of the most amazing developments to come along in the last year is Yahoo Pipes.

This is one of the technologies you'd expect from Google Labs, a sandbox in the playground that is the Internet of today. If you don't feel technically up tp understanding or creating pipes (not to be confused with a befuddled senator's Tubes) you can simply go look at what other people have published.

There are examples you can actually use, such as photos of apartments in a certain area, news stories from major publications on a particlar subject such as stocks, fincance, business, technology, wine, sports...

You can check out the most popular (but not necessarily the best or most useful) pipes here.

One of my favorite uses of Yahoo Pipes is to show a sampling of blog articles from several blogs I select as favorites. Here is anexample of one of those: the OWC Podcasters Group. S, if you added this RSS fed to your own wine blog, it would always show the latest podcast of the selected group.

You owe it to yourself to learn more about using RSS if you don't use it now, because it will save you time by bringing your major interests right to you in a form you can easily browse in the reader of your choice.