What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS? What are the Benefits and Reasons for using RSS:

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows – integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

To subscribe to a feed, you would simply right-click on the orange RSS button and select Copy Shortcut. Then in the program you are using to read feeds, you would select Add New Feed (each reader is different as to where that is), then paste that shortcut into the box that’s provided for the URL to the feed.

Your feed reader will then begin downloading the blog posts into your feed reader for viewing.

Some quick tips:

If you are using Internet Explorer 7.0: When you find a website that has an RSS feed, you’ll see that in the toolbar just above the web page there will be the orange RSS button. If you click that button, it will open the feed page and up in the address bar, you can copy the URL for the feed, then paste into your feed reader.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook 2007: You can read your RSS feeds right in your Outlook. There is a folder called RSS Feeds under your Mail Folders section. To add a feed into your Outlook 2007, you would right-click on the RSS Feeds folder, then click on Add a New RSS Feed, and a text box will appear. Paste the shortcut URL you’ve copied into this text box and click Add.

If you have a Google account, Google provides an RSS feed reader called Google Reader. You can access it at www.google.com/reader. To add a subscription, you would click on the green bar that says “Add Subscription” and paste the feed shortcut you’ve copied into the text box.

Some other web-based readers are: Bloglines, Newsgater, MyYahoo, MyAOL, Bloglines, netvibes to name a few. You can find a really good list on Wikipedia by using the search term, “Feed Aggregators”.

If you’re interested in applications that can be downloaded to your desktop, I use (and really like) FeedReader.com. It’s easy to use as well.

For more information see: http://whatisrss.com/

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