Why would you want to receive feed updates in your inbox rather than checking them in a feed reader? Isn't the whole point of feed subscriptions to browse them at your leisure? For the most part, I don't want to receive an email every time one of the feeds I subscribe to is updated -- I have more than 200 subscriptions, so that would fill up my inbox pretty quickly. However, there are a few select feeds I do want to monitor more closely, so I use rss2email to shoot me an email when those are updated.

RSS, feed readers, and news aggregators are a hot topic right now. Given the massive amount of news available on the net, it makes sense to be able to read all of the news you're interested in, without having to check a dozen or more websites. With a good feed reader, you can subscribe to your favourite news sites - or even to sites you wouldn't read as often as you would like - and have the software follow the news for you.

RSS is one component of the Semantic Web - and the only element currently enjoying widespread use.

Peerkat is a personal syndicated data aggregator living on your computer desktop. Pick up RSS feeds from your favourite sources around the Net. Pick and choose stories that strike your fancy to automagically roll into your own syndicated feed. Peerkat is simple, small, lightweight, extensible, cross-platform, browser-independnent, Open Source, and 100% Python.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending upon whom you ask. It's a Web content syndication format, meaning you can use it to send, receive, and aggregate Web content from a variety of sources. RSS was originally designed for news sites (like us) to make their content available. Nowadays it's also heavily utilized by bloggers.

Using RSS is, well, simple. There are several RSS reader applications for Linux, including AmphetaDesk, HotSheet, Peerkat, clevercactus, Straw, and BottomFeeder. The upcoming Mozilla Firebird browser even has an RSS extension.

The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work.

The Atom 1.0 specification (in the course of becoming an IETF standards-track RFC) represents the consensus of the Atompub Working Group within the IETF, as reviewed and approved by the IETF community and the Internet Engineering Steering Group. The specification is structured in such a way that the IETF could conceivably issue further versions or revisions of this specification without breaking existing deployments, although there is no commitment, nor currently expressed interest, in doing so.