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I really enjoyed class this weekend with the MBAs! I did get a few questions about why we’re using Bloglines, and what’s it all about, anyway?

As I mentioned in class, I’d like you to try some push technologies during our course, as a means of creating your own form of personal competitive advantage in your careers and business ventures.

You’ll have a chance to evaluate these services at the end of our course, and some of you might continue using push services if they work well for you.

This article at ubergizmo.com is a nice, quick explanation of RSS or Really Simple Syndication. RSS uses the XML data standard to push information about blogs and web content to you.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/rss.php

We’re using RSS to support our business intelligence and research projects. Bloglines combines a fine RSS reader with the Ask.com search engine, so it’s almost like one-stop shopping for your research needs.

Next week, I’ll discuss how to use EBSCO along with Bloglines.

There are many, many RSS readers that you can install on your computer. An RSS reader lets you subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from different web sites, and will pull new content into your reader whenever you run the reader program.

Some people prefer that approach, in which the RSS subscription software is installed on your own computer, or what IT professionals call the client. If you’re concerned that someone might hack into a web-based RSS reader account and read your subscriptions, and you only use one computer on a regular basis, then client-side software is a good choice.

I find this client-side approach difficult to use, as I use several different computers in different locations. So I’ve chosen Bloglines as my web-based RSS reader. Bloglines uses a server-based approach, and it is always updating my account with your blog entries and other items on my blogroll, or list of RSS subscriptions.

I’m requiring your groups to use Bloglines because it works pretty well as a groupware tool, and I can focus on your assignments instead of supporting multiple kinds of RSS readers. I’ll admit that Bloglines isn’t perfect. I find the edit window is quirky, and there’s no spell checker. You might consider editing your posts in Word before you copy-n-paste an article into the edit window.

Bloglines is not the only web-based RSS reader. There’s another one that I’ve seen but haven’t tried called Rojo.com. It uses tagging, a technique that we’ll examine with another service called social bookmarking.

If you want to set up your own server-based RSS reader, but you don’t like Bloglines, I’d suggest My Yahoo if you already use that service or Yahoo Mail, and you could try Google Reader if you are a Gmail or Google News user. There are other alternatives available, so use your favorite search engine to find them.