RSS Tutorial: Use RSS Feeds on News Sites and Blogs

What is RSS?




The short answer is that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It’s a form of XML and is referred to as a ‘push’ technology in that it pushes content to a location automatically when the content changes.




Where is RSS?

RSS is all around you online.  In fact, you may already be using RSS.  A recent study suggested 31% of users online are using RSS, 27% without realizing it.  If you are using a customize Google page (www.google.com/ig) or MyYahoo! (my.yahoo.com) you are, in fact, using RSS to read your custom news on those pages. 

RSS delivers news from sites like MSNBC, CNN, Google News, Yahoo! News, Slashdot, Digg and literally thousands of other news sites. 

RSS delivers podcasts and vidcasts as well.  If you are using podcatchers like iTunes or Odeo to subscribe to and listen to podcasts, then you are using RSS to receive those podcsats. 

RSS delivers information, be it textual, audio or video to you, without your having to do anything more than your initial subscription.

Why Use RSS?

Convenience and Security are the most often cited reasons for using RSS.




Convenience - Because RSS delivers only the news feeds that you choose to read, it’s like having a secretary who knows which newspapers you like to read and which subjects are of interest to you, compile and prepare your newspapers with only what you want to read, updated hourly in the format that you desire (ie headlines only, headlines+synopsis or full articles). 

Security – RSS delivery alleviates the possibility of spam.  Because the RSS publisher never actually sees the email address of their subscribers, there is no chance of them contacting the subscribers to push promotional material or attempt to sell them products.




The beauty of RSS is that it is ‘one-click’ to subscribe and, the flip side is that it is also ‘one-click’ to unsubscribe.  This puts a real pressure on the publisher to keep the readers’ value in mind with every post or article.  For the reader, this is great.

RSS Aggregators and RSS Readers