I referenced feed readers a few days ago, and ZenPanda commented that she didn’t know how to use them; I understand, because until I started using Bloglines I didn’t understand feed readers, either, and those little RSS buttons and talk of “syndication” confused me. But now that I do understand, I can’t imagine reading blogs any other way. So although I am far from an expert, here’s what you need to know in order to understand and use a feed reader.

The whole point of blogs - and other websites that are frequently updated, such as news and social sites - is that new content is published regularly. For instance, I publish something on my blog at least once per day (well, try to). Other blogs - such as Instapundit and MetaFilter - publish new material several times every day. And most bloggers read many blogs on a regular basis. So let’s assume that I have a blogroll (a roster of sites that I read daily) that contains 100 different websites. If all of those sites contained a link on my homepage, I would have to click on every single one of those links in order to read the newest content. If you only read a few sites daily, that may not sound like a big deal, but when you’re up into the dozens or scores of sites, it can take a while to click through each and every link just to find out which sites have published new content. And that is where feed readers enter the picture. (more…)