What’s new on the web this week?

Mar 19 2010 by Graham Brown, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

IF you’ve been around on the web for a while you might have encountered RSS feeds by now.

Sometimes they’re called ‘web feeds’ or ‘subscription feeds’ and the idea is that you use software on your computer to read the feeds as they’re updated. A feed is simply a list of new articles from a website.

If, after reading all that, your eyes are glazing over and your head is spinning, you’re not the only one. Geeks love RSS feeds because they save all that tedious faffing about reading webpages, but to most people they’re just too complicated.

Google has had a web-based feed reader for a while now at google.com/reader. Last week they added a new feature to make feeds more interesting and more fun in the hope that ordinary people might use them more often.

The result is what you see at google.com/reader/play. It’s a feed reader, but it doesn’t look like one. New articles are shown as a row of icons across the bottom and each one is displayed in full. Videos just play, images are displayed. Everything just works.

If you like something, you can click on the star or the ‘Like’ button and Google Reader will remember all your favourites.

It’s certainly good to see someone thinking differently about feeds and feed readers, but to the vast majority of people the whole concept of feeds remains a nerdy mystery.

BROWSING AROUND... THE SIX NATIONS

l The Six Nations Championship reaches its climax

www.rbs6nations.com

l Confessions of a rugby ref

londonrugbyref.blogspot.com

l Blood and Mud: “The only rugby blog you need”

www.bloodandmud.com

l International rugger news with lots of videos

www.rugbydump.com

l The Rugby Blog

www.therugbyblog.co.uk

www.rugbyworldcup.com

THING OF THE WEEK

That’s “tro” followed by 10 “lo”s

www.trololololololololololo.com