RSS v Feedwhip

RSS in Plain English by Lee LeFever from The Common Craft Show is an ingenius clip which brilliantly explains the principles of RSS and how it allows you to keep effortlessly up to date with your favourite blogs and websites. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and by pasting RSS feeds into an aggregrator such as Bloglines or Google Reader they will update automatically and order themselves in the same place like emails in your inbox.

Today, I thought I'd try out Google Reader having watched a couple of tutorials on YouTube and added them to my VodPod. Registering was easy and simply required me to log into my Google account on the Google Reader page . For my first feed, I decided to subscribe to the MFL programmes from Teachers TV. To do this I clicked on the Videos link on their home page and then the Modern Foreign Languages link on the left hand side. Next I clicked on the RSS feed for Modern Foreign Languages and copied the url http://www.teachers.tv/video/feed/rss/988/rss.xml from the address bar. That done, I went to my Google Reader, clicked the Add Subscription button, pasted in the link and clicked Add. The programmes from that feed then appeared before me and by selecting on one of the titles and clicking on the read more link I was taken straight to the relevant page to watch the video. Useful stuff.

Although I prefer to use Feedwhip to track my favourite blogs, I can see how a feed reader could help me to collect all the latest content I'm interested in in the same place and therefore save me time in the long run. Amy Gahran from Capture the Conversation has done a great job in trying to persuade me of the virtues of sticking exclusively to one reader with her detailed screencast Setting Up Google Alerts. For the time being though, I think I'll stay with the email system I'm used to and see what difference a Google Reader account makes. Check for an update soon.