Today we're beginning an experiment with paid sponsorships. This is a crucial step on our quest to quit our day jobs.

This week's sponsor is Holtzbrinck Publishers Library Marketing, home of St. Martin's Press, Tor, and Henry Holt, among others. They'll treat you right.

P.S. If your company or organization would like to reach out to our readers please drop us a line.

Up until now I've pretty much ignored the RSS/Atom/News feed phenomenon. For those of you not in the know (and there are still a lot of you), news feeds are files that websites can publish that contain a list of recently published articles or other media such as comic strips. A news reader or "aggregator" reads these files and shows you the articles you haven't yet read. By "subscribing" to the feeds (really pointing your aggregator at those files) you can have an "at a glance" view of your favorite websites in one place.

That's the theory. But last time around I hadn't found an aggregator that worked for me, and feeds weren't universally available. But that's all changed. Aggregators are available in every shape and flavor, and feeds are everywhere. But what finally tipped me over was the news that Google Reader was available in a version I could read on my Motorola Q Smartphone. If there's anything more annoying than visiting a few dozen sites every day, it's visiting them using a phone. So for the past week I've been living life on feeds and I'm already hooked. Today I loaded up on my favorite comic strips. I'm rapidly heading towards a point where my regular reading happens in one place.

As for us, we've had a comic strip feed for several years now. I'm in the process of evaluating a new platform for our website which would add these blog postings to our feed. When that happens we'll be in feedvana, and I hope you will be too.