RSS feeds are a way of keeping up to date with new information. By subscribing to an RSS feed for a news website or a blog, or any website with an RSS button, you get automatic updates through (into your feed reader) when new material is posted on the source website.
Our new friend Netvibes (see Thing 5) functions as a feed reader and it was very straightforward to add RSS feeds - I've chosen the general University of Southampton feed, the Sot23 Things feed and the BBC Hampshire news feed.
I get the point of RSS feeds but I would rather subscribe to have emailed updates from blogs and things like the breaking news updates from the BBC (with the feed on Netvibes you can only see the first line of the article/post then you have to click to go to the source webpage for the full story whereas the email often displays the full text. Plus I like getting emails that aren't from Blackboard). For anything that doesn't have an email alert option I'm happy to occasionally go to the webpage and look directly at that (although I could add it to my Netvibes page if I wanted a reminder that I'm interested in it).
I feel the same way I do about RSS Feeds as I do Netvibes - it is interesting, and potentially useful, to know how to use them, but I don't think I need to use them at the moment.
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