One of the problems with SPAM is that you have to spend so much time downloading and deleting it. Another problem is that people you send email to do too. Your legitimate message may get lost in the deluge. How do you avoid the problem? One way is to offer people to whom you send messages an alternate method of receiving them. For one-to-one communication, the options may be limited--email is the most convenient and ubuquitous method available. But for one-to-many communications, such as newsletters, product announcements, etc., newsfeeds are a great way to go. Newsfeeds come in two major flavors: RSS and Atom. Without going into detail, I'll just say that it doesn't matter much which you choose to publish because most feed readers can handle both.

So what's a newsfeed? It's sort of like a web page: it sits on a web server and waits to be downloaded and viewed, and it usually carries pretty much the same content as an associated web page. But it's also different: aside from the fact that it's viewed using a feed reader instead of a web browser, the approach one takes to reading newsfeeds is also very different. Rather than bookmarking a buch of feeds and occasionally checking your bookmarks to see if there's anything new, you subscribe to a feed, and your feed reader checks for new stuff for you. When it finds that the feed has changed, it shows you only the part that changed, potentially saving you enourmous amounts of time and effort. If you don't have a feed reader set up on your computer yet, I highly recommend doing so. As a MacOS X user, I use NetNewsWire, and highly recommend it.

How can publishing a newsfeed lift your message above the piles of SPAM that people are receiving? By delivering your message on a channel that is virtually impervious to SPAM. Feed readers display only the newsfeeds that a person has subscribed to, so there's no way for a spammer to inject their message into it.

So how do you publish a newsfeed? The easiest way is to set up a blog using a service like Blogger. Once you've created your blog, be sure to go to the "Site Feed" configuration page and turn the feed on. This will give you an Atom feed. If you want it converted to RSS, that can be done using a tool like Grouper. While I'm on the subject, let me mention that you can also display others' newsfeeds on your website using tools like CaRP.

That should be enough of an introduction to newsfeeds for now. Check them out, both as a publisher and as a subscriber. I think you'll find them extremely useful.