Make+the+News+Come+to+You

News services, weather, Edutopia, podcasts, blogs, etc., etc., etc. You want to remain on top of the news available on the Web, but you don't have enough time to hunt for what you want. What to do? Happily, there are RSS feeds. What are those? RSS feeds are updates that come to you. All you need to do is subscribe to the service you want and updates about the site will come to you. No more hunting!

How do you take advantage of this? First, you must select a reader. A reader is a central "place" on the Web that collects the feeds to which you have subscribed. Google Reader (www.goggle.com/reader) is one such reader. Readers are also called news aggregators. Other readers/news aggregators are


 * www.bloglines.com
 * www.newsgator.com
 * My Yahoo
 * Netvibes
 * Twine
 * pageflakes
 * FeedDemon
 * Net NewsWire
 * Newsgator (Outlook Edition)
 * RSS Owl
 * Shrook
 * Universal Subscription Mechanism (USM)

Create an account with the reader. Most readers allow users to customize their page to make categorizing feeds easy.

Second, you must establish a connection between the reader and your favorite site. The process varies slightly depending on the reader you choose. For most, you need to go to your favorite site and click on the RSS icon Note that many sites have icons for My Yahoo, NetVibes, Newsgator, and Google.

<span style="color: #006f80; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Third, follow the instructions in you reader to add the feed to your reader. You may need to paste the site's URL into your reader.

<span style="color: #006f80; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Google has an "Add subscription" button.

<span style="color: #006f80; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">New posts will go to your reader, and you won't have to spend your valuable time hunting for news. It will come to you!

<span style="color: #006f80; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">(If you would like a video showing how RSS feeds work, visit Commoncraft.com's site.)

<span style="color: #006f80; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">**River of News** is a news aggregator for the iPad. It costs $2.99 and synchronizes with Google Reader. It also works with Facebook, Twitter, and delicious. The claim is that River of News is more of a stream and doesn't require users to jump back and forth between header and article.