KINGSTON, Penn. - It's that button you see in the address bar of your browser that says RSS, XML, or RDF. You probably see it, and if you don't know what it indicates, you probably ignore it. An RSS indicates an RSS Feed which is a "format for a regularly changing web contact" according to www.WhatisRSS.com.

RSS Feeds were introduced in March 1999 by Netscape. Anyone can sign up for to follow and RSS feed, and by following a feed it allows you to stay informed about sites that you are interested in. Most sites have the option to follow their RSS feeds, and to follow one its as easy as a click of a button. To view the RSS notifications from subscribed links one would need to use a feed reader such as Google Reader. In the notification, there simply is a few sentences describing the latest post with a link to the post. Before, users would have to surf the web to look for the latest updates on their favorite webpages, now they are offered a brief summary of all new posts in one central location.

Matthew Cartwright, President of the Class of 2014 at Wyoming Seminary, 15, says that he uses RSS feeds "they are useful when I want to be kept up to date on my favorite websites." Cartwright believes everyone should subscribe to RSS feeds so that they can be "as current as possible. "I started using RSS feeds on Nov. 27, 2008, and I will never look back."

For students at Wyoming Seminary looking for the latest news posts on The Opinator, they can simply click the RSS button in the far right corner of the address bar, and they will receive notifications in their RSS feed readers every time one of The Opinator editors posts something.

For anyone looking to be more up to date, RSS feeds are a simple, practical solution.

Twitter: Useful or a Waste of Time?

It seems like everybody is talking about it. Twitter: a site that can be about everything, or a site that can be about nothing. Before I started using Twitter, I thought of it much like blogging. I thought of it as a site full of mindless chatter, and consisting of nothing of substantive matter. I pictured the average 'tweeter' as (not to be sexist) a typical teenage girl who craves attention. However when I signed up for my Twitter account, I never thought I would use it as much as I do.

I first used Twitter the way I thought it was supposed to be used; I posted statuses about my life that probably no one cared about. I tweeted a few more times, and then I forgot about Twitter for a few months. Then I logged back on to give it another chance, and I have been hooked ever since. Users of the website need to find their own purpose for using the website, following people, and tweeting. My purpose for using Twitter is for politics, and particularly political gossip and news. I follow many elected officials, and political journalists and news agencies including several U.S. Senators, and U.S. Representatives, Chuck Todd of NBC news and the Huffington Post along with many others. Some of their Tweets are very interesting and are published faster than on mainstream media sites.

Twitter is also useful to see what people are talking about; and people love to talk about politics. It's especially useful to see what people are talking about when something is happening rapidly. The first time I started searching what people were talking about was during the recent midterm election. I am a Democrat and passionately supported Democratic candidates, and I wanted to see if the Pennsylvania statewide Democratic candidates were going to win. I knew that the voter turnout was key in Philadelphia. If the turnout was very high it was more than likely that the Democrats were going to win statewide. So while I was in line at the local Subway wanting to know how the turnout was, I took out my smart phone, went to Twitter.com and searched "Voter turnout in Philly." What I found were tweets from voters at the polling stations talking about the long lines in Philly. It turns out that the turnout in Philly was very high, however it was not enough to carry the Democrats in the polls.

According to a Pew Research Study, about 8% of Americans who use the internet also use Twitter and of that 8%, 55% of Twitter users post links to news stories and 10% of that 55% do this more than once a day. Twitter is a very news conscious website, and I would say that many of the posts I read about political gossip are accurate even though they are not checked. I have not run into a problem with them in the past. Check out the rest of this survey.

Twitter is useful if you know what to look for.

Check out my Twitter!

Blogging: A Necessary Evil

Newspapers no longer are the news, they're the old. Nobody's asking "What are they saying in the papers?," instead it's "What are they saying on the blogs?"

For me, blogging is pointless. Posting about my life, and my interests do not intrigue me, and may not appeal to whoever may be reading this. I find the idea of the "blogger" as someone who sits on the computer and never gets out to see the world, and therefore I am not as inclined to believe their writing as truth. No matter how much a person may detest blogging, or the bloggers themselves, it is necessary to keep up with what is being said on the blogs. For example, my main passion is for political news and gossip. When I want to find out about the latest political stories, I don't want to check the news because it has become too slow. Bloggers can post anything, including the true stories that established news sources are unwilling to publish, because the difference between bloggers and reporters is that they don't have to verify sources. And it's not just me who checks the blogs for this reason, because political campaigns are always checking what the bloggers are saying about their candidates. If I simply chose to ignore blogs just because I don't like them, I would not be up to date in the political world. If I want to be someone who is recognized among the everyday politicos I need to read the blogs.

Saying that, blogging is pointless for things other than news, and gossip. Posting about your life does not contribute to society, whereas posting about news and other important gossip can contribute to greater knowledge and discussions. Sometimes blogs tend to be 'mindless chatter,' and I think that is what has given me a negative connotation about them.

Blogging is something that I may find annoying, and 'mindless,' however it does have some aspects that do contribute to society. Therefore blogging is a necessary evil.