A Brief Summary of RSS
October 4, 2008
RSS, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is a set of methods to help you stay up to date on changing news on the internet, easily. Essentially you use a piece of software called a reader, or sometimes called a feeder, that goes out to each site that you have subscribed to and it gathers up all the new news on that site. It then displays it in a format that allows you to quickly browse and review each piece of news.
The technology or concept of RSS first came about in 1999 by members of Netscape. The concept then slowly grew over the years and really started to become popular around 2005. With more and more websites offering an RSS feed, it’s popularity rose dramatically and companies like Google and Microsoft created software to read the RSS feeds. There are several formats(versions) of RSS available, 0.90-0.94, 1.0, and 2.0. 2.0 has become more popular and is more stable than the others. It is also probably the most widely used on the internet today.
Blogs are an excellent example of good uses for RSS. Many times bloggers are not as consistent with posting articles on a regular basis as say CNN is about posting new news. If you don’t use RSS to keep up with the blog, then you will have to go to each blog everyday to see if they posted anything new. With RSS, your reader would check it for you and you would see new news when you checked your reader instead of having to pull up each blog site. That’s a huge time savings just to keep up with everyone else.
Some very popular websites that have RSS feeds include:
Software options for using RSS:
Resources:
