What is a News Feed?

The site now publishes news feeds to which you may subscribe. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of a news feed, it is generated content to be read by an automated news reader or aggregator. An aggregator or news reader will automatically notify you when a site you’ve bookmarked publishes new content. The following suggested programs* and sites will allow you to delve into the world of news feeds.

PC

• Feed Demon / 30 Day Free Trial
• Awasu / Free

Mac

• NetNewsWire / Free

Mac/PC

• Thunderbird (email client and RSS reader) / Thunderbird RSS tutorial

Internet Based, Platform Neutral and Free

• Bloglines
• News Gator
• My Yahoo
• Google Reader
• Kinja

Using a news reader listed above, you can subscribe to one of the Gallery’s news feeds, also called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Sites that publish news feeds will often use the following terms or symbols to identify their feed: RSS, news feed, atom, or

There are a lot of terms — some easy to grasp, some irritably obtuse. However, once you get the hang of RSS, aggregators and their ilk, you can selectively harvest your own news. Most major newspapers publish RSS feeds along side thousands of other web sites. You can opt to receive the BBC headlines, New York Times Arts section, your friends’ Flickr photos, and The Gallery of Contemporary Art’s events listings — all conveniently updated in your aggregator when new content is published.

Why, even in Colorado Springs there are a number of news feeds published for your reading pleasure. Mark Arnest from the Gazette publishes an art blog documenting cultural happenings in the Pike’s Peak Region. Atomic Elroy of the now defunct (sniff) Chaos Studios publishes a blog/vlog. Newspeak, the scrappy and precocious newcomer to the indie publishing scene in the Springs, began a blog and is on top of all the news in the area. You can read about it without having to wait for the paper.

If you would like to know a bit more about RSS and syndication, please visit the articles at Mezzoblue and the New York Times for a more thorough introduction, or view the video below:

Glossary of Terms

• Aggregator: Also news reader or feed reader. An aggergator is a program employed by users to scan bookmarked news feeds for newly published content. When new content is discovered, the aggregator retrieves either the full or excerpted content for the user to read.
• Atom: A file format based on XML and used for syndication of content on news websites or weblogs.
• Blog: A shortened form of “web log” (weblog). Blogs are web sites typically using an automated content managment system that are written in a journal-style format.
• News Feed: Content that is syndicated by a site to which users may subscribe via an aggregator.
• News Reader: See Aggregator.
• RSS: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. RSS is a file format based on XML and used for syndication of content on news websites or weblogs.
• Subscribe: The act of adding a site’s news feed to an aggregator to receive site updates.
• Syndication: A process to distribute recently published website content. This is typically done using news feed formats such as RSS or Atom.
• Vlog: A Video Web Log. A blog where entries are made not in text, but in video.
• XML: Extensible Markup Language. XML was designed to ease the sharing of data for large-scale electronic publishing. Computer languages based on XML such as RSS, XHTML, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) among others, allow diverse software to readily parse information written in these languages.

* The Gallery does not guarantee the availabilty or quality of these programs and sites.