RSS

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

RSS stands for either “Rich Site Summary”, “RDF Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” depending on who you ask. There are long, technical explanations for RSS but it’s more easily explained by what it can do than what it is. Essentially, you can download an aggregator and use it to keep track of the updates to favorite websites. You can find a website you like, such as this one and subscribe (bookmark) the RSS feed in your aggregator. Some are labeled RSS and some are called XML. Your aggregator will check the page for you to see if it has been updated whenever you tell it to. This doesn’t sound like much until you consider the sheer volume of information that can be kept track of automatically from multitudes of sites.

My boss, for example participates in a number of professional associations and mailing lists. Her email account is allways overflowing and she is so buried in information that very little of it sinks in. If each of the associations had a news page with an RSS feed, she could flip through the headlines in her aggregator and choose which ones looked pertinent. She could add feeds from the university’s website, the library’s Internet site, and the intranet site to stay abreast of the latest developments in all of these places. This would lighten up her email load considerably and make it easier to find personal messages.

More and more professional sites are adding RSS feeds, giving options for national and world news as well.

All of this information is accessable when it is convienent for the user and collected in such a way that browsing through it is fast and efficient.

RSS Aggregators

Finding Feeds

More Information

Tutorials — laura

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