RSS is an acronym for either Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Source. Which definition you get depends on who you ask. Each name describes a different aspect of RSS.

For the publisher, RSS is a format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Practically, RSS allows site owners to publish (potentially) their sites to a larger audience. The published RSS files are termed a feed.

For the reader, RSS makes it easy to use a program or service called an aggregator to subscribe to a RSS feed. Feeds are automatically updated so you can readers what’s new without having to open a web browser and visit all the sites they wish to follow, one at a time.

For the content provider, RSS makes it straightforward to pull headlines from another website to publish on her own.

The name RSS is really an umbrella term for several formats, including Atom. Which is superior is a subject of heated debate among web developers. For the average content publisher there’s little practical difference. Weblog tools like Wordpress or Movable Type feature built in RSS generating features. So do most current content management systems. RSS aggregators are capable of reading all the current standards, so most people just use the built in capability in their system.

Services like Feedburner can also use multiple RSS standards to republish you feed and make it easier to find.

How it works

To publish an RSS feed, your software extracts information from your article and reformats it in XML. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means. At its simplest, which RSS is, XML breaks your post into parts, like title, date and content, and describes what those are, for other programs to categorize. Having a standard format is what makes RSS work.

The feed is included with your regular web pages and available for other people to subscribe to. This works well for any frequently updated site like blogs, e-zines or news sites.

You may have seen subscription buttons on sites and not recognized them. Here are a few of the more common ones:

Clicking on one of these buttons may surprise you. Depending on your browser you will either see a series of nicely formated articles or a confusing pile of raw code. Don’t worry if you see the code. What’s important isn’t the content of the page but the URL or address. If you copy and paste that into the form you’ll see when you chose subscribe from a RSS reader, the reader will convert that mess into something usable.

Or, some newer browsers like Safari and Firefox allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed directly.

Advantages

You may wonder, why bother? The simplest answer is to increase site traffic. RSS makes your site more easily available to a wider audience. Easier access means more potential traffic.

Blog, podcast and RSS feed advertising are the fastest-growing segments in alternative media, according to a study released today by research firm PQ Media.

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If you ever considered podcasting, well, a podcast is just an audio file wrapped up in RSS.

Want social networking sites like technorati and del.icio.us to find you? That’s right, they scrape for your RSS feeds.

Some people are switching from email newsletters to RSS publishing to avoid having their content thrown in the big spam slush pile and lost or ignored.

And you can submit your RSS feed to online aggregators, making it available to people who would never find your site otherwise.

As a content publisher, RSS also allows you to include headlines from other sites directly in yours. For my MUG site, I have feeds from MacWorld and O’Reilly publishers that give members constantly updated information that I couldn’t possibly keep current enough to post myself.

Other services that use RSS include:

• Newsgroups like Yahoo Groups & Google Groups
• Shared Calendars: CalendarHub, RSS Calendar, Zimbra
• Weather: Weather.com, RSS Weather, Yahoo Weather
• Classifieds: Craigslist, CareerChannel
• Shippments Tracking: Simple Tracking, Track2RSS Project, PackTrack
• Coupons & Specials: Coupons.com, DealNews, HotDeals Club
• Auction Monitoring: Bidding Tools, AuctionMonitor, RSSAuction
• Price Watching: RSStalker, FuelWatch
• Podcasting: iTunes, Odeo, FireAnt
• Video Editing: Jumpcut, Eyespot

RSS Readers

As a consumer of RSS feeds you will want a reader. You can use Safari or a couple other browsers, but their capabilities are limited. To provide more features a whole slew of shareware authors have rushed to create their ideal versions of RSS readers. Some let you read content directly inside the program, some send you to your web browser.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Internet Facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.