What Is Atom?

With the web now containing billions of pages checking your favourite sites for updates can be a real drag. News syndication allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided new feeds, so the latest news and features are delivered directly to you, rather than clicking from site to site.

Not all websites currently provide news feeds, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and most of the big sites do, such as the BBC, Reuters, Google, Yahoo, the New York Times and CNN.

There are currently two standards for news feeds - RSS (or Really Simple Syndication), and Atom. We have chosen to provide an Atom feed for two main reasons - most software can read both formats, and Atom seems to the emerging standard as it is overseen by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

To subscribe to these news feeds you need a news reader. Increasingly these are being built into web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox (where you can add feeds as Live Bookmarks), Opera and Safari, and email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird where you receive the latest news along with your email.

There are also many ways to view news feeds online using a "news aggregator", or they can be added to many of the webmail services, such as GMail or My Yahoo!.

How do I use Atom feeds?

Either drag the Atom icon into your news reader, or you can click on the Atom icon and cut and paste the feed's address into your news reader.

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