WHAT IS RSS?
‘Really Simple Syndication’ (or RSS) is a complicated term for a simple system, which allows you to automatically get the headlines from a website and display them on a platform local to you. That means you can see the headlines from all of your favourite websites in a single place on your computer, without having to actually visit each site. Millions of people around the world already use this feature. And new developments in 2007 – such as the launch of Microsoft’s next version of Windows with a built-in RSS reader – will see it becoming even more important. It’s simple to get an RSS feed from any section of this website. Just click on the orange RSS button on the left-hand side of any web page. Then pick the site and the section you want feeds from, and copy and paste that information into your RSS reader.
Oh my. So few words and such a big question. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is indeed a method for syndicating content online. Blogs have syndication as a standard feature, which is one of the reasons information flows so quickly in the “blog-o-sphere.” Syndication allows individuals to subscribe to web content (a “feed”) and receive it on their desktops as soon as the content is updated – either using one of the newer web browsers or a special software application called a “news reader” or “new aggregator.” Several online services also provide aggregation of your preferred RSS feeds: Google, Rojo, Newsgator, Netvibes, My Yahoo, FeedBucket, to name just a few of the 50 or so. The point of RSS is that information comes to you. And it gets really interesting and useful when companies, services, or web sites provide RSS so you can subscribe to things other than blogs – like search results, product availability, jobs, new home listings, audio or video (podcasts) and so on.
