Do you ever wonder how some people just know so much? You know the guy you meet who knows everything about everything. You wonder if he ever took his head out of a book when he was a kid. You know the type of guy you feel has swallowed the encyclopedia and must have gone to one of the tops schools and loved being there. This is not the type of guy that tends to enjoy football and a pint. Ever a little envious of that intelligent guy? I bet he mighy know about RSS feed readers.

Here is the solution. Get knowledge rich quick by using the internet information retrieval software to gain advantage. Tracking new content on your favorite sites and blogs can be easy if you employ the use of feed readers. All of the major sites and a significant amount of others now incorporate the use of feeds in order to publish content easily to the internet. RSS feeds, Really Simple syndication has become the standard for publishing content to web readers. Using a feed reader to organise what you read can make your surfing more productive and efficient. Many of these services allow you to share the sites and articles you like with others and many provide gadgets to help you republish the content on your own site or blog. Some are mobile friendly allowing you to have easy access to what you like to read almost anywhere. As many sites have incorporated RSS feeds you can use you a RSS feed reader to research all sorts of information including, news headlines, finance, job hunting, blog watching, and social networking. It is not only articles that are published using RSS technology but also photos, video, podcasts and other audio content. If you are a frequent user of the internet you will have seen and be familiar with the orange box with wavy lines, to indicate sound, that is used to identify a RSS feed. Some sites offer the ability to combine your chosen RSS feeds and republish as a new combined feed. RSS sound very technical but from a users point of view it tends to be very easy. You find a site that offers a RSS reader service and drag and drop or cut and paste or sometimes just click and login from the location of the RSS button on the site you wish to bookmark. Once you have a few book marked you basically have your own magazine which is updated as the sites you subscribed to update there content. Some RSS feeds include advertisements as a means to monetise the content. Effectively RSS feed readers provide a free on-line magazine updated regularly with new stuff, designed by you for you, and on most occasions is totally free information sourced from the internet.

Makes you wonder why people still buy magazines and newspapers.

Listed below are the most prominent sites used for reading RSS feeds.

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• FeedReader
• Netvibes
• Newsgator
• Pluck
• Pageflakes

An alternative solution to a RSS feedreader is Google alerts. Sign up for Google alerts and Google will email you all the updates it has on a keyword or selection of keywords based upon Googles search engine. Your preferred topics could be football and beer if that's your thing. You may also just prefer to bookmark your favourite site in your browser it's easier but it might be less productive than RSS feeds.

Web Page Last updated: June 2008