Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Feeding on Blogs, Podcasts, and News with Outlook RSS

In This Chapter

• Explaining blogs

• Understanding podcasts

• Getting an RSS feed

You can manage your whole life with Outlook. What could be more important than that? Blogs and podcasts, that's what! Now Outlook can help you explore the most exciting region of cyberspace: the world of blogs, podcasts, and other syndicated online media.

A system called RSS most often delivers blogs, podcasts, and newsfeeds to the people who subscribe to them. Lucky for us, you needn't know anything about RSS to enjoy its benefits — but it can't hurt!

Feeding Your Need for RSS

Everybody's heard about blogs. If you don't already write one, you probably know someone who does. People blog about anything and everything: their days, their kids, their hobbies (see Figure 11-1 ). Do you ever read your friends' blogs? Of course not — you're much to busy for such piffle.

Read up

The word blog comes from the phrase Web log, a kind of open diary in which people post regular entries to a Web site for the whole world to see. Tens of millions of people write blogs these days. Most of those blogs are silly or terrible or totally useless, or all of those things. But even if many of the blogs out there are useless, many more are important sources of information you won't want to miss. Business Week magazine referred to blogs as “the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself . . . blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite.” ...