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Feed me Seymour, feed me!
Welcome to the magical world of Feeds. You may know of feeds as 
, the most popular commonly visible feed flavor, or you may not. Regardless, feeds are everywhere on the internet these days, from the New York Times to Craig’s List. They can change the way you get information, and you might even use them to change the way you students get information from you.
What is a Feed? The icon above is the universal feed icon. Once you are familiar with it you may start noticing that it shows up all over the internet. A Feed is just an agreed upon way of labeling information and sending it across the internet. Because the information is carefully labeled, other programs can “read” it, understand it, and do things with it.
A good example, and a common use of feeds, is reading online news. Imagine that you have two favorite sources for international news on the internet, maybe The New York Times and The BBC. If you were so inclined, you could wake up in the morning and first look over The Times’s International News page, and then for go over to the BBC News Headlines where you may find a different set of headlines. Both of these web pages provide feed 
versions of their headlines, which means that you can have your computer visit each page for you and combine the information into a new page, one you might call My International News. Thanks to careful labeling on the part of The Times and the BBC, when their individual pages get updated, so does your page that combines them. This is a neat trick that may not seem to make you life that much richer or faster, but imagine if you were interested in something much more specific and had 5, 10, or 15 favorite sources for information, such as Educational Technology.
Feed Readers
One great way to use feeds is to subscribe to them using whatever feed reader you like most. Feed Readers are small programs, websites (like the My International News example above), or web browser extensions that can keep track of many different feeds and alert you when they find something new. The feeds and the readers are not connected, so you can use any reader you like, or even a combination of more than one.
- Google Reader (web/GGears based)
- Bloglines (web based)
- Sage (Firefox extension)
- NewsFox (Firefox extension)
- Safari RSS (Safari Built-in)
- Live Bookmarks (Firefox Built-in)
- NetNewsWireLite (application, freeware)
- NewsFire (application, payware)
Casting
Feeds are great for news and other text based communication, but the idea of reprocessing and reshaping information can and is used in a lot of other ways. Feeds are currently reshaping the world of broadcasting, changing the way that audio and video reaches audiences. Podcasting is the common term for a Feed that contains links to audio files. Using a feed reader that understands audio files, such as iTunes, an listener can have new audio additions to the feed automatically downloaded and added to either a music library or to an iPod, hence the pod part of podcasting. Here in NYC our local public radio station WNYC podcasts a lot of its regular radio shows. Dalton Radio podcasts shows such as The Panic Room as well as a station wide podcast containing every episode of every show.
Podcasting is just way that feeds can be combined with media. Videocasting allows just about anyone to distribute video across the internet and onto subscribers computers, laptops, iPods, cellphones and other media players. Photoblogging has already taken root and Photocasting is taking shape (the latest version of iPhoto supports iPhotocasting).
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