What are blogs?

Blogs are a way to share facts, ideas and opinions directly between people. This blog is run by the makers of Skype and our friends, helpers and partners.

We set up the Skype blogs to present our view of the world, business and technology. Not least, making Skype is an incredible journey and the blogs are a humble attempt to document and capture it. We find making Skype both demanding and fun -- it used to be so in the beginning and continues to be.

We see skype.com and the blogs to be complementary to each other. On [skype.com](http://www.skype.com), you can find our product and service information, as well as the official company profile, jobs info and press releases. In the blog, we hope to capture a bit more dynamics of what goes around them all. It is important for us to know what the world thinks of Skype and we hope to contribute back to the discussion with the blogs.

There are many different category areas here, which you can browse by using the links in the "Categories" section in the righthand menu.

For in-depth info about what are blogs and blogging, see the Wikipedia entry.

What is RSS?

RSS is a pretty geeky name, but the idea behind it is simple. (Some people say it means "Rich Site Summary" and some say it is "Really Simple Syndication". You can even think of it as "Read Skype Stories". We're happy whichever you choose.) In a nutshell, RSS lets you easily keep track of the changes here in Skype blogs and Skype forums, and any other site or blog on the Internet that supports RSS.

You can find the link to the Share Skype blog news feeds in the righthand menu. In addition to the Share Skype blogs, you can also use RSS to track the [Skype forum posts](http://www.skype.com/share/forums/).

#### How do I use RSS?

To read an RSS feed, you need a "news reader" that can read the RSS news provided by a site. There are many different types of news readers available, both web-based and as downloadable software, both paid and free. We encourage you to try out different ones to see which one suits you best. Here are some popular ones.

For Windows:

* [Newz Crawler](http://www.newzcrawler.com/)
* [FeedDemon](http://www.feeddemon.com/feeddemon/index.asp)
* [Sage (Firefox plugin)](http://sage.mozdev.org/)

For Mac OS X:

* [Newsfire](http://www.newsfirerss.com/)
* [NetNewsWire](http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)

Web-based:

* [Bloglines](http://www.bloglines.com/)
* [My Yahoo!](http://my.yahoo.com/)
* [NewsGator](http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/default.aspx)

See also [a good RSS explanation on the BBC web site](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm).