Email may or may not be one of the greatest inventions ever - the jury's still out on that that one - but alongside the World Wide Web it is without a doubt one of the greatest features of the internet. But there is another feature that is possibly even better than email and yet few people know about it and even fewer understand it. It's called RSS.
Nobody even knows for sure what the initials stand for, but in short RSS it is a clever way of accessing information from websites without having to visit the sites themselves. For example, you can see This is Not Work on a service called Feedburner.
But our favourite service is called Netvibes, set up by a former journalist Tariq Aziz, who got fed up trying to keep track of the internet so made something that would do it for him, and us, all on one page.
All of these services are a bit geeky, but Netvibes looks attractive and once you click on Add contact you can paste in a box the url of the site you want to track and it adds it to your page. You don't even have to register, but it is advisable to avoid losing the settings. You can even use it to watch your email, eBay, Facebook (if you're one of those), the weather and more or less anything you can think of.
Give it a go: Netvibes
Or visit the one we made for This is Money
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