There are a couple of important differences between RSS and bookmarking. The most important distinction is that with RSS, the feeds come to you and with bookmarks you go to the site. Let’s take a closer look at this difference.
With bookmarking, you store a link to a particular page of a web site. To find out if anything has changed on that page, it is up to to go through your list of bookmarks and click on them to see if anything is new. But what about if the web author added a new page to that website? How would you know?
With feeds, you don’t have to go to all the individual different sites that you want to track. You go to one central place where all of your feeds come to you. Each feed reader has some system of telling you which of the sites have new content. You can look at the new headlines and then decide if you want to go to that particular web site.
This used to be refered to as a push-pull model. Bookmarks pull the web user to visit the site. RSS feeds push the information to the web user at a site of their choosing.
Bookmarks are great for documenting static information that you want to have as reference like that posting of a digital camera review that you are interested in purchasing. You might want to bookmark that posting about the amazing potato salad recipe. Bookmarks are often made to a permalink of a single blog posting, not the home page of a blog. RSS feeds are dynamic information that changes and is updated. RSS feeds are usually attached to the blogs as a whole or to the discussion of a single blog posting. You don’t want to keep checking those blogs that you commented on. What if you commented on 5 blogs today? By subscribing to the feed for those discussions, you can monitor them all in one place. No longer interested in that discussion? No problem, unsubscribe from that feed.
Next week, we will add social bookmarking to the mix. By using tags and connections we will be able to greatly refine our search for topics, promote our own blog postings and build our connections in the blogosphere.
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A good explanation to some obvious facts.
I wonder how gravatar leaves image n comment so, just testing
Thus far I have been successful with gravatar on a post by encapsulated in an image tag.
I have not yet been unsuccessful in placement of an rss icon in a widget on my blog
Silki
Sometimes the things that appear the most obvious are the one that we need the most explanation
Samtex,
For Gravatars to show, the blog theme needs to have Gravatars enabled. You can also use a plug in to install gravatars to your theme if it does not come with them.
The rss widget that comes with WordPress doesn’t show an icon, it displays the feeds of OTHER blogs. We will be covering feedburner next week when we discuss statistics and that provides a RSS icon.