Atom Syndication and chi.mp
You may not know this, but you can subscribe to any chi.mp site’s activity stream and read it in any news feed reader like Google Reader, FeedDaemon, NetNewsWire or any web browser or client that supports Atom feeds.
What’s an Atom feed? In a nutshell, an Atom feed provides a way for you to subscribe to a website and read changes without having to visit that web site each time. You may also have heard of RSS feeds which is another syndication format that pre-dates Atom.
To subscribe to Atom feeds you’ll first need to get a feed reader. For simplicity sake, let’s start with Google Reader. You don’t need to download anything, just go to google.com/reader and sign up. The next step is to add an Atom feed by clicking on Add a subscription and entering the URL for your .mp site. For example, if I enter anthony.mp and a list of possible feeds will appear. The feeds listed will include my main activity feed, which in my case is http://anthony.mp/profiles/3.atom and I can click the Subscribe button and from then on any time a new item shows up in my activity stream it will also appear in my Google Reader account shortly thereafter.
In addition to your activity stream you (and others) may also subscribe to your blog posts. Every mini-blog has an Atom feed that you can subscribe to. For example, if I want to subscribe to Laurel’s (a fellow employee here at chi.mp who is a bacon-fanatic) blog posts then I would either click “Add a subscription” and enter http://laurel.mp/blog in the field, or I could search for “laurel.mp blog” or I could even just grab the feed URL by right-clicking on the little feed icon 
on Laurel’s blog and copying the URL. If your browser supports it you may even just be able to click on the Atom feed icon and have it automatically add it your subscriptions.
Atom feeds can be a great time-saver for you since you can collect together a bunch of feeds in one feed reader and just read all of the updates there without having to go to each web site to see if has been updated. If you’re not already using a feed reader to subscribe to activity streams and blogs from other chi.mp owners I highly recommend you try it out.