The technology of real simple syndication (RSS) allows Internet users to subscribe to Web sites that have provided RSS feeds. These are typically sites that change or add content regularly. The ACFE Boston RSS feed will present a headline and a few lines about our news announcements and a link to the full story. Unlike subscriptions to many printed newspapers and magazines, most RSS subscriptions are free.

RSS is widely used by the Weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines, of their full text and attached multimedia files. In mid- 2000, use of RSS spread to many of the major news organizations, including Reuters, CNN, and the BBC. These providers allow other Web sites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds under various usage agreements. RSS is now used for many purposes, including marketing, or any other activity involving periodic updates or publications.

A program known as a feed reader, or aggregator, can check RSS-enabled Web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major Web sites, as well as many smaller ones.

Client-side readers (aggregators) are typically constructed as stand alone programs or extensions to existing programs like Web browsers. Such programs are available for various operating systems.

Wikipedia (open source online encyclopedia) provides an up-to-date list of news aggregators for Web based reading, desktop reading and for reading from within your Web browser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators

Those in the Microsoft Windows environment can find RSS resources on their Web site.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/web/expert/bridgman_05november21.mspx

Subscribe to our RSS feed to get news delivered directly to your desktop.

To view our feed in your RSS Aggregator/Reader.

1. Copy this graphic's URL/shortcut:
   http://acfe-boston.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_rss&feed=RSS2.0&no_html=1 
   (Internet Explorer and Netscape: Copy Shortcut, Firefox: Copy Link Location, and Safari: Copy Link)
2. Paste the URL into your reader or personalized content web page like iGoogle, MyMSN, MyYahoo!, etc.

Advantages:

Web feeds have some advantages compared to receiving frequently published content via email:

• When subscribing to a feed, users do not disclose their email address, so users are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email: spam, viruses, phishing, and identity theft.
• If users want to stop receiving news, they do not have to send an "unsubscribe" request; users can simply remove the feed from their aggregator.
• The feed items are automatically "sorted" in the sense that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box, where all mails are in one big pile and email programs have to resort to complicated rules and pattern matching).