What are Blogs and RSS?

What are blogs?
Blogs, short for Weblogs, are a way to share facts, ideas and opinions directly between people. They are usually a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order. This blog is run by members of eBay's Community Development Team, and will focus on providing interesting, useful, or fun (sometimes all three) news about eBay and the Community.

There are many different category areas here, which you can browse by using the links in the “Categories” section in the lefthand menu.

For in-depth info about what are blogs and blogging, see the Wikipedia entry.

RSS is a pretty unusual name, but the idea behind it is simple. In a nutshell, RSS, which is essentially short for "Really Simple Syndication" (some people prefer to call it "Rich Site Summary"), is a technology that makes it easy to see updated headlines from websites or pages that you like.

To read an RSS feed, you need a “news reader” that can read the RSS news provided by a site. There are many different types of news readers available, both web-based and as downloadable software, both paid and free. We encourage you to try out different ones to see which one suits you best. Here are some popular ones.

For Windows:

• Newz Crawler
• FeedDemon
• Sage (Firefox plugin)

For Mac OS X:

• Newsfire
• NetNewsWire

Web-based:

• Bloglines
• My Yahoo!
• NewsGator

Making the Chatter Blog Your Homepage

Using Internet Explorer

1. Click this link: Set the Chatter Blog as Your Homepage

Using FireFox

1. Pull down the Tools menu and select Options
2. Select the General category
3. Type www.ebaychatter.com in the Location entry box under the Home Page heading
4. Click the OK button