The oddly named del.icio.us is a system for saving your favourite links so that you can read them from any computer on the net. You can also read link-lists that others have made.
Many bloggers like to import their del.icio.us list into the sidebar of their blog.

A quick look at ‘del.icio.us popular‘ will show you the most popular links on the net at any time.

del.icio.us is an example of an Internet tool that is allowing web users to build references and knowledge bases through co-operation over the net.

The American magazine, Business 2.0 - Holes in the Blogosphere? reports that blogs may not have been quite so influential in the US presidential race as some think. A study shows that they follow the buzz as much as they make it (are journalists any different?).

But Business 2.0 goes on to say that marketers can’t ignore blogs, as traditional advertising is losing its effectiveness.

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“The media coverage on the auto industry of late has done much to paint an ugly portrait of General Motors… ” writes General Motor’s Vice Chairman Bob Lutz in his FastLane Blog on March 30th 2005.

Lutz is clearly frustrated with what the traditional media is saying about his company. But his Blog lets him put his message out directly without the aid (or interference) of journalists.

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The Blog Herlald is a blog about blogging with quite a bit of interesting news. It is part of a group of blogs The Weblog Empire
which aims to raise money through advertising.

QuickBooks is a an accounting software package by Intuit. The team behind their online version has set up their own blog.
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“Monitoring America’s favorite drug dealer .” Clearly not an official publication.

Microsoft got off to a bad start with blogs when it fired a contract worker for blogging a photo of apple computers being delivered to the maker of Windows.

Now the world’s biggest company has decided that it’s better to blog than be blogged. It hosts a compendium of blogs by 1400 employees in its many different departments around the world: Microsoft Bloggers . It’s an example of blogging for corporate cohesion.

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Google hosts a galexy of blogs on its ‘Blogger’ platform, so naturally it has a blog of its own. In its own words it gives ‘Googler insights into product and technology news and our culture.’

In this post you can see pics of Googlers playing volley ball.

You would expect Jupiter - who publish research on the electronic media - to be at the forefront of blogging. Sure enough, they have a blog for their analysts. Some entries are rather wooden, ‘We have just launched our latest product…’, others are lively and opinionated. JupiterResearch Analyst Weblogs.

Boeing’s Vice President for marketing, Randy Baseler, travels the world talking about Boeing’s take on commercial aviation. He says that his blog is a way to ‘expand the conversation.’ Randy’s Journal shows how a senior executive can use a blog to ‘evangelise’ - but Boeing have been even more creative. They have created a blog written by the team working on their new 777 worldliner. See Flight Test Journal . This is the live and immediate way to feed the massive interest in one of the world’s biggest product launches and bring it down to a human scale. It’s like an unfolding documentary.

RSS is all about "Really Simple Syndication"  of a blog’s content.

To get an idea, go to our Bloglines page.  You will see that we subscribe to various RSS feeds.  It’s easy to flick from one blog to the next.  What you don’t get is the full web page design.  It’s pure content.

Bloglines is probably the best place to get started.  It’s free to open an account and create your own Bloglines page where you can read the feeds of your favourite blogs and news services such as the BBC.  

Bloglines is an example of a web-based service for reading RSS feeds.   Some people prefer to use a piece of software on their own computer known as a ‘news reader’ or ‘aggregator.’   This downloads feeds onto their desktop or into a special folder, or even into their email in-box. Feedreader is one of the best known software tools for RSS.

A long list of news readers that download content onto your PC can be found here.  And a list of web-based news readers can be found  here. 

Some web browsers, such as Firefox and and Opera have news readers built-in.  The next version of  Windows Inernet Explorer (IE7) will also have one.

What ever method you use, you will probably have to give your news reader the address of the RSS page you want it to subscribe to. Ours, for instance, is http://www.blog-relations.com/feed.   Sometimes you will be able to press a bright button to  add a feed to your news reader.

‘Atom’ is the same idea as RSS, but a slightly prettier format.  RSS is  more widely used.  

So next time you see some brightly coloured buttons on the sidebar of a blog, you are probably looking at options to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed.