News aggregators
One relatively recent development is the use of news aggregators, using an XML format such as RSS, to receive relevant news headlines.
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language and is a standard format for computer-readable documents which makes it straightforward to process them automatically.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a method of describing news or other Web content that is available for syndicating (ie: feeding or distributing) from an online publisher to Web users. The term "syndication" derives from the newspaper industry practice of sharing content between different papers. A column or a cartoon (such as Peanuts) which appears in numerous different papers is described as "syndicated".
There is a useful introductory article at:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-rss.html?dwzone=web
and another at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm
A news aggregator is a software application that collects syndicated content from a variety of sources and displays it as a single web page. A website may incorporate aggregator features by republishing syndicated content on one or more of its pages. Aggregator features also can be added to other client software, such as Web browsers, e-mail clients, weblog creation programs, or media player programs, to allow these programs to display syndicated content.
You can get more information from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator
Let's take a look now at News providers ...
