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What is RSS?

Let’s start with a bold claim: “RSS has the potential to change your life by changing how you spend your time.” Of course the next question is, “Can it really?” Potentially, yes.

RSS is an acronym for Really Simply Syndication or Rich Site Summary (people still debate this, apparently). The idea started in the late 1990s, but recently RSS began moving into the mainstream as Weblogs gained exposure. It gained traction because people began reading a large quantity of sites each day, but they weren’t updated on any sort of set schedule. So people would waste a little time here and there each day checking their bookmarked sites for new content. To avoid this pointless ritual, someone created a code class that checked certain sites each day for updates and changes, then updated the user of the status. It could post the alert to a program that resembles the user’s e-mail, to a code widget embedded in their Internet browser or even to their mobile phone.

RSS feeds are especially useful to people who constantly use news sites, watch the stock market, monitor blogs or depend on information for a living. It can be customized to fit any user’s needs. RSS is simply a way for the BeautySchoolsDirectory blog or any other web site to send headlines straight to the user. You just need to download something that kind of looks like an e-mail program (commonly called an RSS reader or aggregator) that retrieves the content for you.

“I see RSS and its aggregator program as the TiVo of the online world,” said newmediajournalism.com creator Gary Love. “Allowing readers to set up an RSS aggregator like NewsGator or Bloglines to watch certain sites for you, then whenever the mood strikes you, you can pop on in and read the stories that interest you. My little aggregator sits on my desktop and checks my favorite sites every 20 minutes. I wouldn’t have the time to check all those myself.”

This all works thanks to the XML platform. Don’t know what that means? Don’t worry, there’s no quiz at the end. The insides of RSS look like this and that’s more than you need to know to take advantage of the ease it offers. The glory of RSS is that very few people actually need to have any idea how it is made, what it looks like, or what the heck a GUID is (globally unique identifier). It is merely a simple file system that works well with many programs on many different platforms.

The real potential of RSS is that it could be the future way of gathering information from the Net. Alternative browsers like Firefox already incorporate RSS into their software. This level of interest could move the technology to the masses and get it out of the hands of the “vanguard geeks.”

Some experts believe the technology has endless possibilities. “There are many people, myself included, who think RSS will one day replace e-mail. It can’t be spammed,” Love said.

We’ll close with another bold claim. “RSS can’t be spammed yet.”