What is RSS?

6 March 2009

Statistics show that most Internet users don't know what RSS is, and for this reason they wouldn't subscribe to any feeds.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, although you may also see people using the terms Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary as well.

You will often see the orange RSS icon on a page, or you may see this icon on your web browser.

Internet Explorer shows the icon in a toolbar

And Firefox shows the icon in the address bar

RSS is a way to syndicate with a website's feed and so be alerted whenever they add new content to the feed.

The feeds are usually used for news and for blog entries as these are constantly updated and so need to keep the website visitors up-to-date.

Once you click to subscribe to a feed you are shown a list of feed readers that you may want to use.

I personally use Google Reader and I find it really good. I have subscribed to about 10-15 feeds and each has it's only category on the feed reader. Any updated feeds (feeds with new content) are highlighted so they stand out.

On Google Reader you can also set favourites and share feeds with others. Every Google Reader account has their own public favourites page, mine is - www.google.com/reader/shared/15586057576910103121

A lot of people won't find RSS feeds useful, but if you're on the Internet most days and have websites that you want to stay up-to-date with then this is a perfect answer.

Keep an eye on all your websites from one feed reader.

With social networking and Web 2.0 so big these days, there's bound to be plenty of websites that you're going to want to keep an eye on.

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