What is an RSS Feed?
Usually understood to stand for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including blogs. A news aggregator such as bloglines collects RSS feeds and displays new items from each of them. For more background on RSS, see this Introduction to RSS by Web Reference.
The acronym RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s an increasingly popular way for Web sites to alert regular users to new content—and for users to access that content. An RSS feed is a dynamically updated summary of a Web site’s offerings. Whenever an RSS-enabled site adds fresh content—articles, blog posts, videos, or anything else—that content is automatically added to the site’s feed or feeds. By using a so-called RSS reader (see below) to subscribe to the feeds from your favorite sites, you’ll know immediately whenever something new has been posted to those sites. Syndication means you don’t have to visit each site individually to see what’s fresh—you can simply scan headlines and brief article summaries and then click to be taken to the full text. That’s the “really simple” part. VF.com’s feeds update as new features and stories are added to the site, so you get up-to-the-minute info on the latest entertainment news, political scandals, cultural milestones, and more.
RSS feeds are addresses that look pretty much like any other link on the web (http://…) but act differently. When you give an RSS address to an RSS reader (called subscribing to a feed) it will tell you when there is something new at that site! For example, if you subscribe to a friend’s RSS feed, your RSS reader, will show you when she uploads new photos! Or if you subscribe to a group’s discussion, the new posts will come to you in your RSS reader instead of you having to go to the group. Flickr has RSS feeds for photostreams, sets, favorites, group pools, group discussions, recent activity, the Flickr Blog, and even some searches! You will see this icon on the bottom of any page that has an RSS feed. When you see that, copy the “Feed” or “Latest” link next to it, and give that to your RSS reader. (the ‘geoFeed’ link is for geotagged photos and the ‘KML’ link can be used with Google Earth.) If you don’t have an RSS reader lots can be found here.
