NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Over the past few weeks, we have been working with the NextBillion.net team to upgrade some of this website’s features to make it easier for you to access the content you need. The most recent addition, and probably the most obvious, is the improved RSS integration with NextBillion.net.

RSS lets you subscribe to have all new content posted to a particular website sent to a newsreader where you can read it. What this means is that you can subscribe to all your favorite news sites and blogs and check them all just by going to one place, your newsreader.

RSS had been allowing you to receive news and posts from NextBillion.net without ever coming to the site. Now it’s even easier for you to sign up to receive RSS updates and keep them organized. If you use My Yahoo!, Bloglines, or NewsGator as your newsreader, all it takes is one click to subscribe–look for the buttons on each category overview page.

You can also now sign up to receive RSS updates just on particular categories on NextBillion.net. For example, if you want to track just new posts on microfinance, subscribe to this feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/NextBillion/blogs/topic/microfinance), or if you’d like to track health news, use this one (http://feeds.feedburner.com/NextBillion/blogs/topic/health). You can sign up for as many categories as you’d like to or subscribe to the entire site. You can see a whole listing of RSS categorieshere.

Of course, you can use other newsreaders too. You?ll still be able to subscribe to news based on category, but it will take a little bit longer to subscribe–but it’s still easy. Many of you have probably seen the little orange boxes that say ?XML? or RSS on websites like the BBC and Yahoo! News. This means that you can subscribe to receive updates from the site. Just click on the box and copy the url of the page it takes you to.

Please post any questions you have about NextBillion.net’s RSS or RSS in general. This technology is still very new but quickly gaining in popularity, so if you have questions probably a lot of other people do too. We will be checking in on this thread daily to get answers out asap.
-Eric (and the Development Seed team)