What Is RSS?
Author: Madison Lockwood

RSS is technology - a simple software program - that allows you
to access web and blog content automatically. The acronym's most
popular translation is "Really Simple Syndication. Once your
browser or computer has an RSS reader on board, you can
subscribe to any number of RSS "feeds." A feed is simply a way
in which a reader may subscribe to website content - most
commonly blogs or news sites. A news site, for example, may
list their latest headlines or entire articles in their feed
every time a new article is published. A blog would publish
this feed as a series of recent posts.

Feeds are published by millions of publishers, from small
individuals to large organizations like Newsweek. The value of
a feed is that it brings the most current site content to you
in a format that is easily scanned; further, you are spared the
task of visiting each source site each day. This is typically
done through the use of what is called an 'aggregator' or 'feed
reader'.

Feed readers or RSS readers, are software programs that run on
your computer (or PDA or phone); let you easily subscribe to
feeds, and allow you to read through them efficiently. Some are
relatively simple, showing the headline and summary. The fancier
ones often work with (or in) your browser to make viewing the
material look much like the source page. Once you have a reader
on your computer, subscribing to a feed with is an easy click or
drag from your browser. Sites that provide RSS feeds will
usually have a button for that purpose.

There are several RSS feed formats as well as one with an
entirely different methodology called Atom. Atom has become
popular with some bloggers and blogging tools. Some aggregators
can read both. The other acronyms you will see in "feedspeak"
are XML, which stands for 'extensible markup language' and is
the code standard for these simple text feeds. An 'OPML" file
is a format for indexing hierarchical feed lists. If you dive
into this web habit in a big way, your aggregator or reader may
keep your subscription list in an OPML file.

An RSS feed is a great method for staying abreast of issues and
topics that interest you. There are a number of feed
"libraries," so to speak, from which you can learn what's out
there in your areas of interest. Google has a built-in reader
that makes the subscription process easy, as does Yahoo.
Firefox has a downloadable extension for the purpose of
aggregating RSS feeds, as well as a default ability to save RSS
feeds as "live bookmarks" that update via the RSS feed. You can
download a number of stand alone readers and aggregators; you
can find them through a simple web search.

The whole RSS "movement" is a step towards utilizing the
Internet more efficiently. The trick is to avoid overloading
your email inbox with daily reports that you end up ignoring
most of the time. For that purpose, there are sites like
Feedster that will search millions of RSS feeds for articles
that are relevant to your interests. Like any search tool,
however, these services are hit and miss. They are still
working off keywords and sometimes what they find is relevant,
sometimes not. But if you want daily news broken into
categories, it's great technology once you learn how to make it
work for you.


About The Author: Madison Lockwood is a customer relations
associate for http://www.apollohosting.com. She helps clients
understand how a website may benefit them both personally and
professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting,
ecommerce hosting, & VPS hosting to a wide range of customers.