Richard Flynn :: no comment

So, you read the first part of this series and are now excited about the possibility of subscribing to feeds for sites you like. I now propose to give some step-by-step instructions for how to do that, whether you use Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer on Mac OS X or Windows. This article concentrates on the Mac, specifically how to set up and use my free feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire from Newsgator.

The principles of subscribing to a feed

When you want to subscribe to a site, there are three steps you have to take. Keep these in mind and you've won half the battle:

1. Find out if the site / section you're interested in has a feed of some kind;
2. Find out the address of that feed;
3. Give that address to your feed reader to add it to your subscriptions list.

It would be remiss of me after writing my earlier article about Microsoft's lack of transparency not to refer to the latest posting on the blog of the Mac Business Unit (the department in Microsoft which writes software for the Mac). You'll remember that I complained (and I wasn't the only one) about the lack of real information being made available, especially about the support for Exchange servers in the forthcoming release of Microsoft Office for the Mac.

The Mac Business Unit has apparently taken notice:

On the serious side, one of the themes I found could be summarized as "more transparency, more data". That is the goal of this blog and we are working towards that. While we can't answer every question in real time, we are listening and we are using that

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If you’ve been using the Web at all during the last eighteen months or so, you will almost certainly have seen the proliferation of advertisements of ‘RSS’ or ‘feeds’. Although many people have attempted to explain what these things actually are and why they’re useful,¹ I’m sorry to say that for the moment this feed thing has mostly remained the preserve of the geek. I’ve tried to encourage people to find out why RSS would be a good thing for them to use, but they’ve mostly glazed over as I begin to explain the whole thing.

So, I thought it might be helpful briefly to sum up in this article why RSS and feeds are useful, and then (in the second article in this series, soon forthcoming) to give some—I hope—clear instructions for you to play along at home,

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Yes, the title is supposed to be oxymoronic.

In the April 2007 edition of Wired magazine, there was a feature about corporate ‘transparency’, especially in tech companies.  In this instance, ‘transparency’ means opening your company up to the world, warts and all, so that the general public—all of whom are potential customers—can see what’s going on on the inside.

The idea which promotes corporate ‘transparency’ is that by talking about what you’re doing day-to-day, you increase general interest in your company, brand, and products.  Of course this ‘transparency’ is most commonly effected in the form of blogs and other new-media online content produced by named individuals within the company.

In order to achieve full transparency, the individual should be

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