Years ago I purchased NetNewsWire, an RSS feed aggregator designed for the Mac by NewsGator Technologies. (Their Windows RSS feed reader, FeedDemon, also seems to get high reviews, but, being a Mac head, I have never used it.) I actually tried several feed readers at the time I began feeding at the RSS trough, but of all the readers I tried, I fell in love with NetNewsWire.

In an extraordinary move, a few weeks ago NewsGator Technologies made all of their RSS feed readers, including NetNewsWire, free downloads for everyone--not your standard business model! (They do sell other software and services.) I highly recommend this cool tool. No, I highly recommend this essential tool.

Many people still don't know or have a really fuzzy understanding of what RSS feed aggregation is. And for those who do know, RSS is often used much too little. RSS is far too powerful to be so little used. If you do not subscribe to RSS feeds, you are really missing out.

What Is It?!
The easiest way to explain RSS feeds and their aggregation (fancy word for "collection in one place") is by example: If you had a child at Mabry Middle School, where every teacher blogs (even the counselors, media specialist, nurse, the PTSA, etc.), you could easily have to check 10 or more web sites (blogs) to keep up with what is going on in your child's school. On some days the teachers have posted, and sometimes they have not. The daily process of checking each blog quickly becomes a little tedious--even with the generous use of numerous bookmarks.

So, let's make this easy!

On the first day of school, use an RSS feed aggregator, like NetNewsWire, to subscribe one time to each teacher's blog. (You never need to go to those blogs again if you don't want to.) From that day on, every time you launch NetNewsWire, or any RSS feed aggregator you choose to use, NetNewsWire tells you how many new posts have been published by which teachers. All of the posts come to you in one place--in my case, NetNewsWire. When I launch the program, it looks at every blog or website to which I have subscribed and brings me the new posts.

In NetNewsWire I can read a summary of each new post. If I find it of interest, I can click on the summary and see the entire post. I can even click on the title of the post and open the blog from which it came.

If I have two children at Mabry, I can have two folders: one for the teachers of one child, and one for the other child. I can have a folder for news sites like CNN and the BBC, a folder for technology sites like Wired and Boing Boing. I can even have NetNewsWire search the internet for posts about specific topics and keywords with which I want to keep informed with the latest information. In this post I am only scratching the surface of the many powerful possibilities, but lest I overwhelm those who are first learning about RSS aggregation, I'll stop here.

As far as I am concerned, every student in middle school and up (at the least!) should use an RSS aggregator daily. This can be a powerful learning and research tool when used well.

Why Not Use Your Browser's RSS Capabilities?
For one thing, only the latest version of Internet Explorer has any RSS functionality built into it. Since a significant number of internet users use older versions of IE, this may explain why RSS subscription has not become standard practice. The old version of IE can't work with it at all.

And while both Safari (for Windows and Mac) and the new version of Internet Explorer have RSS functionality built into them, they lack some of the amazing additional functionality provided in the free RSS feed aggregators you can download from NewsGator Technologies.

How Do I Use It?
All you need to know is that blogs and even many websites create RSS feeds. One of the ways you can tell a site has an RSS feed available (not all do): they are typically identified with an icon that looks much like the one pictured next to this paragraph--small orange, "radaresque" icons. (I picked one that's a little fancier than usual.) You click on the feed icon which launches NetNewsWire or whatever aggregator you have installed on your machine. (The fancy feed icon pictured in this paragraph is linked to this blog's RSS feed!) You select the folder you want the posts from the feed to appear in within NetNewsWire. You have now subscribed. Now all of the new posts from that feed, that web site, that blog will automatically appear in NetNewsWire everytime you launch it.

Go ahead and try it. Download a free aggregator from NewsGator Technologies. Click on my feed icon near the bottom left sidebar or in the paragraph above, and watch what happens. This is a better, more efficient way to work!

Teach the parents of your students how to subscribe to your blog. Teach your students how to subscribe to your blog. (Don't even tell me you don't have one! I'll leap right through this screen and point my finger in front of your nose for your not using best practices!!)

If You Are A Geek (Like Me)
You will want to check out this post about tweaking NetNewsWire to provide you with abundant functionality. Also read this post. You can: have NetNewsWire feed you your blog stats, your mail, posts about you, comments made to your blog, podcasts, create smart folders, post an article to your del.icio.us account, post an article or a highlighted section from an article to your blog, show you blogs that aren't actively posting, show you blogs that are using the most bandwidth, send podcasts to iTunes to sync to your iPod, send your feeds to Safari on your iPhone (or other mobile devices, or any computer browser in the world), have your feed summaries appear in the sidebar of your blog, and on and on and ...

Educators, this should rock your world!

Articles on Wikipedia
RSS
Web feed
Aggregator
NewsGator Technologies

Articles about Blogs and RSS for Teachers and Parents at MabryOnline.org
Under the Hood of Our Website
How to Subscribe
Overview Information (which contains numerous resources about RSS)

Let's go a little deeper into NetNewsWire--which, I remind you, is now free. If you haven't read this earlier post, start there unless you fancy yourself a bit tech savvy (meaning you understand the concept of RSS).

You collect all of your RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. You read all of the posts that arrive in NetNewsWire from all of the sites to which you subscribed (this is almost always free). As you come across a post you find of interest, you can open it in a tab in NetNewsWire to see the actual webpage or open it in your default web browser. These are the standard options you would expect to find in any RSS aggregator.

This is what I call munching through the feeds. It's a quick process of skimming and scanning, even using the search features if you're looking for something in particular, to find important or interesting information from your collection of RSS feeds.

Post to Your Blog
But you have more options. You can select a portion (or the whole thing for that matter) of an important post and click on "Post to Weblog." NetNewsWire launches your blogging GUI software* and creates a new post containing the highlighted material. At the end of the quotation NetNewsWire adds a citation to the source of the quoted material. What an efficient way for educators to work professionally! (You can customize the look and feel of this feature if you're feeling uber geeky.)

Do You Have a Del.icio.us Account?
You can also select "Post to del.icio.us" and NetNewsWire, using your del.icio.us account settings, opens a standard del.icio.us window for you to fill out thus saving the URL to your del.icio.us account.

Clipping Folders Rock My World
But here is one of my favorite features: you can create Clipping Folders. Let me explain by example. As a teacher I could create a clipping folder for each of the subjects or units I teach. I come across important resources from my RSS feeds that I want to share with my students. As I read the resource in NetNewsWire and decide I want to share a post with a class, I click on "Add to Clippings."

I then drag the clipping from the general clippings folder to one of the specific clippings folders I created. For this example, we will say I created a "Civil War" clippings folder where I'm collecting all of the posts on the Civil War that I want to share with my Social Studies students. In one location, my "Civil War" clippings folder, I can build a webquest for my students.

Now this is where the program rocks! I tell NetNewsWire to create an RSS feed for my "Civil War" clippings folder. It gives me a link (URL) to the RSS feed for my "Civil War" clippings folder. (Don't worry about how it does this. It's just very clever!) I post the RSS feed link to my blog and require my students subscribe to it.

Wow! Now every time I add a site to the "Civil War" clippings folder, it shows up in each of my student's RSS aggregator, where ever they are, for them to read and study.

Not Just for Teachers
System and state level curriculum specialists, this has important implications for your work as well. You can have the educators you supervise subscribe to specific clippings folders you create.

Public Relations can set up a clippings folder in which you add posts from schools and teachers who have done noteworthy work you wish to highlight. Then place that RSS feed in a column on the system's main website. Set it to show the 5 most recent posts from your clipping folder. Now you have a simple way to distribute fresh highlights to your system website from individual websites in your school district--yet another important reason to have blogs as school websites instead of regular html pages! Don't forget to have the local paper(s) subscribe to this feed as well.

Mobile Access
NetNewsWire also offers you access to your RSS feeds on your mobile phone as well. You can skim the post summaries on your iPhone. As you read the summary, that post is marked read. Send the ones you want to read in detail to your general clippings folder. When you have time and are seated at a computer with a larger screen, you will notice the summaries you read on your phone are marked read on the computer. You can go back to the general clippings folder to read the posts you wanted to revisit in more detail.

Windows Users
I am assuming that NewsGator Technology's Windows RSS feed aggregator, FeedDemon, would have to have very similar functionality to NetNewsWire as the company owns both.

More...
I've only scratched the surface. NetNewsWire has more powerful functionality than I've discussed so far. Here are a few things to whet your interest: smart folders that search your subscriptions intelligently; special subscriptions from search engines, tags, bloglines, even local files; most and least viewed statistics; bandwidth usage per feed, etc.

Now That You're All Excited
In order to use clipping folders and use the mobile features I believe you have to have a paid annual subscription with NewsGator. The annual subscription isn't expensive, and I do not know if they offer site licenses. I would suggest taking things one step at a time. Download the aggregator. Use it. If it's a comfortable fit, explore it in more detail. When you fall in love, purchase a subscription.

* Blogging GUI Software: This will be the subject of some future post I'm sure. But for now: You can purchase really inexpensive programs that run on your computer and link you to your blog. Rather than using your web browser to publish to your blog, you launch the program and fill in the window. Click publish. Done. These programs often add additional functionality to publishing (making adding pictures from your computer or from flickr easier, for example) and are especially helpful when you publish to multiple blogs. I really like ecto (Mac and Windows). I have played a little bit with MarsEdit (Mac only), and Adobe's Contribute (Mac and Windows). I'm sure others exist as well.

Apparently May 1st is also "official" RSS day. As I travel around speaking to educators and parents, I find that RSS is still a huge mystery to the great majority of people. I suspect RSS is one of the world's best kept secrets. So many people don't even know RSS exists. And of the people that do, many have some foggy notion about what it might be. I must admit, I had a bit of difficulty getting my head around the power of this technology myself.

Resources to Learn About RSS
So, in honor of RSS Day, here are some easy-to-get-your-head-around resources that really help clear up some of the fog of mystery.

Let's start with a short, easy Common Craft video about RSS. And Back in Skinny Jeans has a great post entitled, How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way, that's an easy and informative read. Wesley Fryer, over at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, wrote a post explaining RSS back in 2005. (And if you still want to see more videos on RSS, check out these search results for "RSS" video on YouTube and "what is rss" on TeacherTube.)

I've written about RSS a few times over the years. You can check out these posts as well if you like:
More on the Power of RSS and NetNewsWire (2/1//2008)
Cool Tool Alert: NetNewsWire (2/3/2008)
Under the Hood of Our New Website (6/2006)
How to Subscribe to MabryOnline.org through RSS (6/2006)

Saving the Best for Last
And three other sources for your RSS learning pleasure: these are actually RSS aggregators. Don't worry if you're not sure what that means. Just go to either type (online or download) or both of these, and start using their aggregator. As you use it, and each resource will guide you through how to do so, you will begin to understand more about RSS. After all, we really learn by doing!

Bloglines (setup your free online account)
NetNewWire (Mac free download) or FeedDemon (Windows free download)
Google Reader (setup your free online account)

I know you're busy. Your time is jammed full. But RSS is just too powerful to ignore! It's an efficiency tool. RSS can help you find what you're interested in much faster by having it automatically come to you! Start learning it today!

A Great New Twist
My blogging system allows me to create an RSS feed from a search request on my blog. So, in the search field at the left, I typed in "RSS." All of the posts I have published that contain "RSS" appear. In the sidebar on the search results page is Subscribe to feed. The search field created an RSS feed for the search results!

What does that mean? Well, you could subscribe to the search results. In other words, if you subscribed to the search result for "RSS," from now on, anytime I publish a post that includes "RSS" that post would go straight to your RSS aggregator. Nifty little thing that RSS feed!