Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Yahoo!Groups goes RSS

There's a useful new feature now available on Yahoo!Groups -- each e-list now has an RSS feed. If you follow e-lists and also use an aggregator like Bloglines, you'll need no further explanation and you may well find this as welcome as I have done. You don't need to allow the emails to build up in your inbox any more -- you can simply follow what's going on in all the lists you are interested in by subscribing to their RSS feeds. One disadvantage, though, is that they are only providing headlines and a couple of lines of content, enough -- on the whole -- to let you know if it's a message you are likely to want to read further, but perhaps less convenient than it would have been to have all of each message availble.

If you don't yet use an aggregator to read blogs and more, the one I prefer, and I've tried a lot of them, is Bloglines. You can register there and then begin to explore. You subscribe to a blog feed just by writing the URL into a box and pressing a button. You can then read each blog entry within bloglines without having to surf from one site to the next, which, with the proliferation of useful blogs, would be a bind. You can also receive emails through bloglines and now read your e-lists too.

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