What is RSS?

Ain't jargon fun? This reminds me of the time I was attending a meeting at IBM and the vice president of our division said "I just found out what a paradigm is... and now I need a new one!" RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication), and is a means of distributing (or syndicating) news headlines on the Web.

Why is that interesting? Because this allows programs to track this specially formatted data stream and let you know when there's new material added to a website of interest to you. It's also a cool way to track just the information you want to keep tabs on, and pull it off the web without spam getting in the way. This site, and others that offer RSS feeds, have buttons like these which let you add the feed to the list of sites you wish to track.

 

My friend Dave Taylor, who runs the Ask Dave Taylor website (which of course is RSS-enabled) explains below how this all works, why you should care about RSS, and how to get started.

Let's start with an example. I track a number of different business newswires and was reading about the Proctor & Gamble acquisition of Gillette at least a day prior to my colleagues. How do I know that? Because they've told me that it was my own article on the subject (P&G buys Gillette for $57 billion) that alerted them to the $54 billion transaction).

Helpful Hint: If you'd like to track an RSS feed and you have a browser with RSS support, just click on one of those cute little RSS or XML buttons. If your browser doesn't know what to do with that and instead shows you a cryptic page of text, you'll need an RSS reader or aggregator. Keep reading, but remember that you can also "right click" (or Ctrl-click for you Mac folks) and copy the link address to your buffer, then paste it into a 'subscribe' field in your reader.

The problem is, I don't want to check 100 RSS feeds any more than I want to visit 100 Web sites every day, and that's where aggregators come in. Whether they're standalone programs, plug-ins for your favorite Web browser or email program, or Web-based services, RSS aggregators remember your subscription list, check each site on a periodic basis, and alert you to any new articles that have been published.

If you're not thinking "wow, very cool" then you are spending too much time visiting Web sites! To scan the headlines of just a dozen sites on an hourly basis would probably be a full time job and if you need to keep abreast of your industry, as I do, then you wouldn't have any time to actually do anything, which would obviously be deleterious to your career long-term! :-)

So there are programs you can download that are RSS aggregators (or RSS readers, basically synonymous) for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix systems. A few of the most popular are FeedReader for Windows, NetNewsWire and NewsFire for Macintosh and Lifera for Linux.

Finally, you can subscribe to an RSS aggregator Web service which gives you a custom Web page that includes the newest information from your hand-picked RSS feeds. The highest profile solution to this is My Yahoo, which recently announced support for RSS feeds as additional personal home page information sources, though it just shows you a rolling 'latest five articles' from each source, so it doesn't work for me because I'd still be left trying to remember which I'd read or not. Other possibilities include AmphetaDesk, or Bloglines.

Whichever solution you choose, I promise you that once you start traveling down the road of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators, you won't turn back. In fact, you'll find that every time you go to a Web site that you like, you'll immediately start hunting for that "RSS" or "XML" button. I certainly do, and I'm more plugged in now than I could ever have been in the past. It's a rolling sea of information out there, and an RSS aggregator gives you a sail and GPS navigation system. It might just save your life out there!