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You don’t have to visit MarkTzk.com to get the latest post. If you do visit everyday, that’s great, but I know you’re probably busy, and you get distracted, and sometimes you just forget. No problem. You can subscribe to the MarkTzk.com feed (for free!), and the latest updates will come straight to you.

There are two ways to subscribe — via email (see below) or via the MarkTzk.com RSS feed.

First, via email. Just enter your email address below and my friends at Feedburner will send you a confirmation email. Click on the link in that email and you’ll be subscribed. Once each day, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. eastern time, you should get an email with all of the posts from MarkTzk.com from the previous 24 hours. Just one email a day, and each email comes with instructions about how to unsubscribe in case you get tired of it. There’s no risk, no spam, just the latest posts.

Second, via RSS. If you know what an RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication) feed is, you can add it to your reader right now. If you don’t know, let me explain.

What’s RSS?
I like to think of RSS as something like email for chunks of content that reside on the Web. You fire up your email program or log in to an online email provider like Hotmail or Gmail, and you get the emails that have been sent to you. You don’t have to go to any place but your email program to read them. You can tell there are RSS reads available because often there will be a little icon that shows up your browser address bar that indicates it. In addition, you’ll see little RSS icons, like the orange one at the top right hand corner of this page, that indicates the presence of a feed.

RSS readers
An RSS reader, or feed reader, is a program that reads RSS feeds. You fire up your reader (usually a desktop application or an online reader like Google Reader or Bloglines) and as new items are added to feeds that you’ve subscribed to, they appear in your reader. If you subscribe to MarkTzk.com’s feed, every time I write a new post, it shows up in your feed reader. You don’t do anything but periodically check your feed reader, just like you check your email periodically. If you want a somewhat more technical explanation, check Wikipedia.

More than blogs
Feed readers are useful for lots of other things besides reading MarkTzk.com. In addition to blog posts (and nearly every blog publishes a feed you can subscribe to), you can also use feed readers to get news, weather updates, podcasts, and lots of other stuff.  (Steve Rubel listed 35 ways you can use RSS a couple years ago, and his list barely scratches the surface.)

Choose a feed reader
If you don’t have and use a feed reader, I recommend you get one. I use Google Reader, and I like using a web-based reader that I can access from any computer (at home or at work), but there are plenty of choices. In addition to free online readers like Google Reader, Bloglines and Rojo, there’s a pretty good chance you already have a web browser or a program like Microsoft Outlook 2007 that has the capacity to read RSS feeds built in. Here again, Wikipedia has a pretty good list.

If this is unclear, email me your questions and I’ll try to answer them. Otherwise, please subscribe.