It's one of those things that turns out to be very difficult to explain. Basically, any website that posts articles, news updates, journal entries, etc. could theoretically set up a "news feed" that an RSS aggregator can view.
In practice, this means that when I go to my aggregator, I get a sidebar that lists all the new articles in Slashdot, OS News, News.com, Dave Winer's weblog and a few others. I can click on any link to read the full article, mark them all as read like it was a newsgroup, etc. It saves effort on my part--instead of going to a bunch of websites I go to one (the aggregator), and I can also quickly review websites that are occasionally interesting but not interesting consistently enough for me to go to under my own power. I'm already using my aggregator regularly even though it's not finished.
Incidentally, all paid LiveJournal accounts generate RSS feeds, although in practice I've found that the LJ "friends" page works better as an aggregator for reading your friends' journals. LJ also uses RSS to let you add a few popular websites as "friends" and use LJ itself as an aggregator. (Look at http://www.livejournal.com/users/slashdot/ for an example of that.)
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2002-09-19 18:26 (UTC)In practice, this means that when I go to my aggregator, I get a sidebar that lists all the new articles in Slashdot, OS News, News.com, Dave Winer's weblog and a few others. I can click on any link to read the full article, mark them all as read like it was a newsgroup, etc. It saves effort on my part--instead of going to a bunch of websites I go to one (the aggregator), and I can also quickly review websites that are occasionally interesting but not interesting consistently enough for me to go to under my own power. I'm already using my aggregator regularly even though it's not finished.
Incidentally, all paid LiveJournal accounts generate RSS feeds, although in practice I've found that the LJ "friends" page works better as an aggregator for reading your friends' journals. LJ also uses RSS to let you add a few popular websites as "friends" and use LJ itself as an aggregator. (Look at http://www.livejournal.com/users/slashdot/ for an example of that.)