What’s RSS? What’s Twitter?

RSS:

RSS is a subscription technology that allows you to follow the news at kwantlenchronicle.ca without having to visit the website. Receiving an RSS feed from the Chronicle, or other websites that offer RSS, is simple: you use a program called a newsreader, either on the internet or your computer’s desktop, and articles from this site are automatically delivered to you.

There are many options for reading feeds: the two best-known are Bloglines and Google Reader. Both are web-based (meaning you can access your feeds from any computer) and both are free.

Once you’ve set up an account with Bloglines or Google Reader, you subscribe to feeds by clicking the “Add Subscription” button and entering an URL (in our case, kwantlenchronicle.ca). Either of the feedreaders will find the appropriate link (which you can access by clicking the subscribe button at the top right of our site) and add that to your list of feeds.

Chronicle articles are “fed” to the internet as they are published: using a feedreader, you can read them (and anything else you subscribe to) at your leisure. You can also, from the feedreader, click on the article to be taken to this website, should you wish to comment on any article

Twitter:

Twitter is a free, SMS (short message service) where users send “tweets” (the limit is 140 characters) into the public stream, and directly to other Twitter users who are following them. Twitter users also have the ability to reply to other users or send direct messages to those they are following, if they are being followed by that user.

The range of tweets is wide: everything from “what I’m doing now” to political debates to interesting web links.

Signing up for Twitter is free. Once you are a member, you can search for other members or choose people to follow from the public stream. If you click on the link at right, you’ll be taken to the Kwantlen Chronicle’s Twitter page. After you’ve logged in, you’ll have the ability to follow the Chronicle. Once you’re following us, every time a new article is published, the headline and a link will show up in your Twitter feed.

You can either follow your Twitter stream at the Twitter website, or use a desktop-based app, such as Twhirl or TweetDeck.

(Note: There is a short video at YouTube that introduces Twitter. Twitter has become much more than just a social networking service: many newspapers, commentators and others are using Twitter as part of their publishing strategies.)