If you need a little help sorting out your RSS feeds from your Wikis then check out the videos on The CommonCraft Show. Lee LeFever explains the basics in a wonderfully clear way and will get you started with some suggested links to try out. Topics include:

Twitter
Social Networking
Social Bookmarking
Blogs
Wikis
RSS

RSS (really simple syndication) feeds let you syndicate your online content - blogs and podcasts for example - by allowing people to subscribe to the feed which means that they don’t have to keep checking back to see if you have posted something new. This is a great way to make it easy for people to stay involved and interested in what you are doing and it also increases the chances of new people discovering you and your work.

If you have a blog or other content you would like to syndicate you can control, optimize and track your feeds with a tool like Feedburner (some of their services are free and others cost money).

If you want to read somebody’s blog or keep tabs on their latest podcasts, you can aggregate all the feeds you are interested in following in a number of ways. I personally use Google Reader to keep tabs on all my favorite blogs and iTunes to download podcasts. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds through an email client like Thunderbird or embed them on your website or blog.

The joy of RSS if you are a content creator is that your content is embedding and spreading and you don’t have to do all the work!

Read more on this in the Lessons in DIY article in Filmmaker Magazine.