RSS stick #3 more

I am leaving some notes here that I have found useful for me. This is a copy/paste that I want to keep.
Once you learn about RSS, learning about other new tools becomes much easier, which makes RSS a potentially very important thing for educators (and students) to understand.
What is RSS?RSS allows you to subscribe to online news and updates that are important to you. Once you subscribe to a source, you no longer need to visit that individual web site to check for updates... the updates come to you. Searching or browsing the web is a good way to locate sources initially, but once you've located them there is no need to return to them over and over. If they offer an RSS feed, all you need to do is subscribe.TIP: Subscription, by the way, is FREE.What is an RSS feed?An RSS feed is really just a file (on a webserver) that includes information about the updates you are interested in. RSS is a lot like HTML, the programming language behind websites. Web browsers (like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari) can read HTML code and display a web page for you. RSS code is very similar, but must be read by an RSS aggregator (or reader), which can then display the update for you, including any enclosured files such as PDF documents or podcasts. I too am glad that others are sharing their knowlege with me. Without the help from others to explain some of this technology I would never know that it exsits. Thank you, Thank you.
I found the following comment to be one such very helpful tidbit.
*Unlike most blogs powered by Blogger, we don't use the built in Blogger feed. By default, Blogger uses "Atom" feeds rather than RSS feeds, so we use Feedburner to convert the Atom feed to RSS 2.0 specifications. Because RSS is more flexible and more common that Atom, other websites can access our content more easily.Also, when your feed runs through Feedburner, they provide you with a ton of cool tools to track, promote, and distribute your feed. One of these services is the "email" feature. So, even though it looks like a typical email newsletter, the whole thing is being powered by RSS and Feedburner! Essentially, Feeburner monitors our Atom feed, and when it notices a new post on the blog, it sends an email out to everyone who added their name to the list. In many ways, it's much better than your typical email newsletter, because we can author our "messages" in one place - Blogger. So whenever we publish a new post, a new email "automagically" goes out.And it's all thanks to RSS!