Reminiscent of the heydey of UseNet and newsgroups, XML and RSS feeds have brought back the concept of content delivered to your desktop.

I might not have found out about it, but About.com recently changed our sites to be XML-based, RSS compliant and altered the main page of each site to be a blog format. There was an orange rectangle labeled XML on my page and I wanted to find out what it was there for.

It turns out that there are hundred or thousands of syndicated XML sites that you can automatically received data from.

I downloaded a free utility called FeedReader (FeedReader.com) and proceeded to populate it with XML feeds from a site called Syndic8 (Syndic8.com).

You can search for almost any topic under the sun and many metro and regional newspapers and publications. You can configure how often you want FeedReader to check for updates and have it temporarily display a pop-up window on your desktop when new information arrives.

I added a number of computer and network security sites as well as my local news and some other hobbies of interest.