Idle Questions For CBR Tech-Heads

[Michael P]

There are a couple of new faddy computer thingies that I don't quite understand. You guys are smarter than me, and can therefore help.

1. Gmail: What makes it so cool? As far as I can tell, it's free email, and you have to have a friend invite you in, or something. What am I missing?

2. RSS Feeds. What the hell are they, why does every blog and newspaper site keep telling me I can set one up on my website, and why should I care?

[Brandon Hanvey]

People like gmail mostly because of the storage size, now 2 Gigs. Plus they have pretty good spam filtering as well as searching features. You still have to be invited at this time.

RSS feeds let you get content from a site by downloading it to an RSS reader. That way you can get a lot of info from various sources without having to go to every site. Most of the time the feed is a part of an article or a summary that inculdes a link to the full article.
Most blogs, and news sites uses them. Even CBR has its own RSS feeds (http://www.comicbookresources.com/rss/).