If you are using Rich Site Summary (RSS) and know of any relative feeds that are not listed at the bottom of this post, please email me to let me know. Other than that, the purpose of this post is to inform non-RSS users of the benefits of RSS. In short, RSS feeds bring websites of your choosing to one place on your computer instead of you having to go to site after site to look for updates or other new material. Unfortunately, whether sites have RSS feeds to offer is completely up to the webmasters. Afterall, why would a webmaster want to use a technology that would keep internet users from visiting their website? There are a few academic sites, listed below, that do. But CNN and Fox, for example, send only their top 5 headlines through their RSS feeds. There are several free programs to choose from that will accept these RSS feeds. They are listed below along with some example RSS feeds that might be of interest to social scientists. Also, if you do not want to fool with learning a new technology and its software but are interested in RSS, you can go here: http://www.bloglines.com/. Most RSS programs do require Microsoft's .NET to be installed on your computer. You can get that from the MS Updates option under your Start button if you use Windows. This is the RSS reader that I use: http://www.awasu.com . It is one of the easiest to set up and learn. A tour of what the program does is located here: http://www.awasu.com/tour.php . Five software packages that require a bit of technical knowledge are SharpReader ( http://www.sharpreader.net/ ) and Wildgrape News Desk. A Java installation is required for nntp//rss ( http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/ ), a program that lets you read RSS files in Outlook Express or any other newsgroup-reading software. Or if you would like your RSS headlines in a news ticker, try wTicker ( http://www.wticker.org/mt/ ). Headline Viewer is another type of news ticker ( http://www.headlineviewer.com/download.html ). When you come across a website that offers a RSS feed, all you have to do is copy the address and paste it into your RSS reader. Here are some rss feeds that might be of interest to political scientists: China News http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&c=China%20news ------------------ US Political News http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&c=US%20politics%20news ------------------ US Political Columnists http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&c=US%20political%20columnists ------------------ US Social Policy http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&c=US%20social%20policy%20news ------------------ Working-Paper Sites of Political Science http://workingpapers.org/rss.rss ------------------ CNN Top Stories (not great, but we need to see what are students are seeing) http://csociety.purdue.org/~jacoby/XML/CNN_TOP_STORIES.xml ------------------ FOX (not great, but we need to see what our students are seeing) http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/67/3167.xml ------------------ If you want to read more about RSS, here are some links for you to explore: http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/ http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/rssone.html Chris Williams, Ph.D. Mississippi Virtual Community College http://www.msvcc.org