A Really Simple Explanation of Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Using RSS allows you to pull content from many sources into your website, news reader (aggregator) or blog. It also allows you to syndicate content from your own website or blog for use by other sites.

How Does RSS Work?
Content producers (anybody) use the XML language to mark up selected content from the website or blog so that this content can be easly identified and picked up by news aggregators and RSS directories. This marked up content, along with a title, a short description of the content, and a link to the site that contains the content is called an RSS feed.

Sites usually mark RSS feeds with graphic symbols of various kinds. See sample icons above. Typically just the Title, Description and link appear on the web site or blog pulling from the feed.

How to Read Feeds
To read a feed, you need a news reader (called "aggregator "). News aggregators let you subscribe to news feeds, such as the New York Times, or to less well known feeds on web sites and blogs. Usually all you have to do is provide the aggregator the feed link or URL of the web page containing the feed. Just Google on "news aggregators" to get specific information about subscribing to an aggregator. I use a relatively new one called RSSJam, but there are many.

How to Create a Feed
For beginners it's usually easiest to buy third-party software for creating feeds. Googling can turn up many such software packages and services. The service that I use to create this blog automatically creates feeds for the content of this blog.

It's also possible to add XML code containing the feed directly to your web site page. If you are a newbie to RSS, a helpful book is Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds For Dummies ® (Paperback) by Ellen Finkelstein http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764588486/104-1265630-4975154?v=glance&;n=283155

Marketing Your Feeds
In a process similar to submitting a web site to search engines, you submit your feeds to RSS feed directories and to aggregators. Just as with web search engine submission, there are services that will do it for you. One I use is called RSS Submit.

Why should you go to all this trouble?

• If your feed gets picked up by a lot of other sites, you will have a free syndication on that site and draw traffic back to your own site.
• Heck, you might even make a name for yourself and draw advertising to your blog or web site.

Some Applications

• Add feeds to your web site or blog to syndicate content and draw people back to your site.
• Pull in feeds to your blog or web site to concentrate information about a particular topic, along with your own comments.
• Create web pages with training course content that can be accessed with a news aggregator. This is a perfect way to deliver just in time training and eliminate a lot of production costs.
• Create user manuals that can be accessed with new aggregators and updated centrally and distributed automatically.
• Create power user tips pages within a corporation to provide best practices to software system users. For example, each of several power users or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can have their own blog page on the corporate intranet. Each user has a news aggregator they can use to subscribe to the Power Users' or SME feeds.
• Businesses can use RSS feeds for their customers as a value-added service. For example, an industry newsletter.
• RSS avoids many of the hassles of corporate firewalls and spam. The reader chooses what content he or she wants to see and gets it on demand.