What Is RSS and Why Should You Care?

By Debbie Weil

You may be noticing more and more little orange RSS icons on Web sites and most blogs. Here’s a quick primer to RSS: what it is and why you need to know about it.

What RSS stands for
RSS variously stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. The former is the more commonly accepted phrase. It also helps to explain what RSS is.

What RSS does
RSS is a new way to both distribute and receive content online without using email. Publishers use RSS to distribute a “news feed” to readers. Readers subscribe to an RSS feed via a newsreader or news aggregator.

(If you want to get techie about it, RSS is based on XML, a standard for exchanging information between Internet applications.)

Why you need a "newsreader"
A newsreader is a little piece of software (it can also be an online service) that is downloaded to your desktop. It delivers a headline, short summary and a link back to the full text every time an RSS news feed is updated.

News sites such as Yahoo! And CNET have been publishing RSS feeds for quite a while. More recently, the RSS buzz is about blogs.

Most blog software automatically includes an RSS feed. If you subscribe to a blog via RSS, you are alerted every time the blog is updated.

Biggest plus: no email is involved
The beauty of the RSS format is that no email is involved as the delivery mechanism. So no overflowing inboxes or spam filters to block your e-newsletter if you're a publisher.

The downside for publishers, however, is that you don't know much if anything about subscribers to your news feed or blog. Your readers don't need to give you an email address in order to subscribe. That’s a plus, of course, for those concerned about privacy.

(Caveat: FeedBurner is a Web-based service in beta that enables you to get stats about your blog traffic.)

In a nutshell, what the fuss is about...

So why the excitement? In a nutshell:

• RSS circumvents spam filters & email overload.
  
  
• You no longer have to actively visit a long list of Web sites (or blogs) for information on specific topics or industry verticals. It comes to you automatically via the RSS feeds you've chosen.
  
  
• Publishers can be sure that their blog or news updates are being successfully “pushed” to interested subscribers without being siphoned off into email junk folders.
  
  
• Some advertisers are looking to RSS as a new way to push their messages to a targeted audience. It remains to be seen whether blog publishers will accept this. Blogging purists are already saying "no" to advertising within the editorial environment of a blog.

Bottom line... We're still in the early-adopter phase when it comes to syndicating content via RSS. But it's catching on faster and faster – just as blogs are becoming more and more accepted as an online communications tool. Stay tuned.

... And if you want to cut your learning curve in half, check out our Business Blogging Starter Kit report at www.BloggingStarterKit.com.


Below is a sampling of the kinds of useful resources included in the Business Blogging Starter Kit:


RSS Newsreaders (selected list)

NewsGator
http://www.NewsGator.com
(Highly recommended. Integrates seamlessly with Outlook - DW)

FeedDemon
http://www.feeddemon.com/feeddemon/index.asp

Feedreader (free)
http://www.feedreader.com

Pluck (free)
http://www.pluck.com

BlogExpress (free)
http://www.usablelabs.com/productBlogExpress.html/

NetNewsWire (for Mac)
http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Bloglines (Web-based)
http://www.bloglines.com



This article was first published in the Sept. 30, 2004 issue of WordBiz Report.