Here is a page showing “channels” that HCR High School has set up. High School subscription page. A channel is basically a web log that users can subscribe to. On this page there are channels of many different types:
- General Interest
- Prinicipal’s Corner
- Daily Menu
- Student Counseling
- …
- School Committee Channels
- Technology committee
- Family School council
- …
- Classroom Channels
- Journalism
- English
- World Lit
- …
- Sports and Athletic Channels
- …
Subscribers go to bloglines which is a free aggregator service.
The service aggregates RSS feeds from the web logs that a user is subscribed to. Instead of navigating to all the different web logs to read them, a user only has to go to one site, the bloglines site and see all the aggregated content from all the web logs to which the user is subscribed. No installation of additional software required. Membership is free, but some services that bloglines offers are fee based.
Bloglines has a notifier service that sends out an automatic notification (Windows platform only, not Linux or Mac) to subscribed users when a web log is updated. It is a little (204Kb) TSR Windows process that runs in the background. Reading a bit more, I see that for Linux and Mac users there is also a web-based notification service.