You may have heard of the acronym RSS – which stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Although you may not be familiar with what exactly RSS does, many people use it without actually knowing it. What RSS does is that it allows publishers of information (websites, blogs, etc.) to distribute/push their information and content out to various sources and allows you and other people to consume/pull that information without the need to continually check individual sites, blogs, or online information.
You may have seen a little orange icon on websites, in your internet browser, and many other places that looks like the one on this post, that is the RSS icon that is used to let you know that there is an RSS “feed” on a page or site.
In addition to being able to subscribe to RSS feeds (so you don’t have to keep going back to your favorite websites to see when they are updated), RSS allows you to reach a lot of people without the need to drive them to your website every time you update or post new content.
You can subscribe to RSS feeds by using a feed reader like Google Reader and some sites (like BigManta) allow you to subscribe by email. Every time a new post is made you can then view it in your feed reader or it will be delivered to you by email.
This short video is the best example that I have seen of exactly what RSS is and what is does:
No comments yet. :-(