Simplifying Really Simple Syndication (five times fast…)

For those who have waited with baited breath, here's the third installment in my web2.0 series:

If you've used the internet for more than fifteen minutes in the past several years, or you've used Outlook or Firefox, chances are you've seen a little orange box with a radio signal in it. Well, that happens to be the icon for RSS.

RSS you say? What on earth is that!? — Well, it's not that easy to explain, but it's a really useful tool that could very well make your virtual experience easier. It certainly helps mine. And, what's more important, it could help you keep users coming to your site, inform your "customers" (whether they're buying products or simply reading your material) of any news, and it can help you streamline information you want to provide subscribers.

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It has been other things (Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary) but for all intents and purposes we're going to stick with the name that makes the most sense. Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it sounds like: you publish information or content on your page, and the RSS web feed is syndicated so that subscribers get content without much or any need to seek it. It's kind of like (or exactly like) a newspaper or magazine company. You write material, it publishes it and sends it to the people who have enrolled in a subscription. So, imagine you're Sports Illustrated. You've just written an article, and as you publish it on your website your RSS feed will syndicate it so that your subscribers will get it at their doorstep (or in this case, a virtual mail-box like aggregator).

Those articles will appear in what's known as a "feed reader", which is really a tool used to collect newly published articles by people you've subscribed to. Those feeds will include either the full article or a summary (your choice) as well as author information and the date. The readers come in both web-based and desktop-based formats, and the long list includes readers like BlogLines, FeedDemon, FeedReader, and NewsGator. Most Browsers also include an aggregator, and typically it just requires going to the "feed" link on a website and bookmarking it. When you do that, you'll often see the name in your bookmark bar followed by a number in parenthesis like : New York Times (25). In this case, it means I've subscribed to the NYT and I have 25 published articles that I haven't read. The great thing is that the aggregator does all of the work for me. I don't need to update or refresh it. As articles become available, the number will change accordingly.

Because the history is long, boring, and techy (and most of you probably don't care) here's a brief summary. The first significant contribution was a format created in 1999 by Ramanathan V. Guha for Netscape. (pretty much the only browser in the eighth grade!) This format was mostly limited to my.netscape.com users, and was pretty much destroyed in AOL's restructuring of Netscape in 2001. After that, UserLand Software and RSS-DEV Working Group took up the banner, and in 2002 UserLand released our current version, RSS2.0. For the designers out there, 2005 marked the official acceptance of the ubiquitous orange RSS icon as IE and Opera adopted it from Mozilla.

I personally subscribe to several feeds, including those at Quipsologies, BrandNew, Ryan's Blog, and numerous web aggregators.

So, make your life and website content really simple, and syndicate it, stupid! (MYRSSS!)