by Glenn Fleishman glenn@tidbits.com

Apple has quietly offered RSS-based news feeds for a while, but the company recently added a page that lists every feed, which includes many subcategories. For instance, you can monitor all the latest downloads, or just downloads by category. Likewise, you can get an update whenever iTunes songs are posted in certain genres, or generate your own custom query. http://www.apple.com/rss/

If you haven't heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication, among other expansions), it is a simple way for a Web site to format (or "syndicate") a list of their latest headlines or Web log entries so that a corresponding RSS news reader can subscribe to a given set of headlines, given the feed's URL. In Apple's case, you Control-click the XML icon next to the feed name and copy the URL to the clipboard before pasting it into your RSS news reader.

With RSS, you control the subscription, and your email address isn't passed to the site. If you want to know more The Seattle Times had a recent article about RSS.

A popular Mac OS X RSS news reader is the free NetNewsWire Lite from Ranchero Software. The US $40 NetNewsWire lets you post blog entries to popular blogging software and hosts.
http://www.tidbits.com/channels/tidbits.rss
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001786075_ptrss08.html
http://ranchero.com/netnewswire

Glenn Fleishman, a Seattle freelancer, writes the Practical Mac column in Personal Technology.

MACinations April 04