Time to get to grips with the basics ...
The delivery difference: You go to blogs. RSS "feeds" come to you.Next, the content difference: Weblogs/blogs (short definition) are just Web pages that are updated frequently, with the most recent item on top. No matter what you've heard, relatively few blogs are just "headlines and links." Bloggers put a lot of themselves into what they do. Some blogs are like newspaper news, opinion or gossip columns. Some are personal diaries. Most have recommendations or commentary on the things they link to. Some are like a stack of essays or classroom handouts, which is how mine began. RSS feeds are generated by blogs, but also by publishers like The New York Times, the BBC, PC World or Apple's iTunes website. They can deliver headlines, story summaries, or the full contents of an original source, along with links to the Web version.
Third, the reader-tool difference: You read RSS feeds with an "aggregator" or "newsfeed reader," while you read Web pages with a browser (and e-mail with a mail client). Here's a list of RSS aggregators. You don't "go to" RSS items any more than you "go to" e-mail. You subscribe to an RSS feed and it "comes to you" whenever you run your aggregator. The aggregator can be an application on your desktop or a service of a Website that does the aggregating for you. (Think of the way Yahoo is a multi-service "website" that provides an e-mail service.)
Q: Why bother with an RSS aggregator if you can read the same content through the browser? Why have the same wine in two bottles?
A: Wine is the wrong metaphor. Wine improves with age. News is more like fish. RSS syndication is a matter of getting the freshest news.Extreme example: I know a guy named Jay who subscribes to literally one thousand and one RSS feeds. He checks them DAILY. Rather than spend all his waking hours making the rounds of 1,001 websites to see if they have anything new, he lets an aggregator tell him which ones are updated. He skims those. Somehow he also finds time to read Dante, study French, go to college, sleep a little, hold down a job and report on things in his own weblog. He's 18, I think... and very smart. He also showed great marketing instinct when he named his blog makeoutcity.com
