What is RSS?

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 6:35 pm

Every one knows the online World is constantly evolving and playing an ever-increasing role in our everyday lives. One manifestation of this is the fact that a growing number of people are following the day’s happenings by visiting various news sites like CNN, Fox News, etc. More evidence is shown in the expanding number of blog sites (~ online journals on different topics) and readers following them.

With more and more interesting sites popping up everyday, how is anyone supposed to be able to keep it all straight?

Up until recently, most people bookmarked each site and would then visit them on occasion to read any new posts. As the number of blog sites skyrockets however, that task is taking more and more time consuming and virtually overwhelming!

Fortunately we have now entered the 21^st Century and a group of techno-gurus have developed a neat solution called Really Simple Syndication or RSS.

As a matter of fact, this blog has a way to invoke RSS by clicking on the graphic image of the dude reading the “RSS” newspaper (upper right side of blog page) or the RSS link to his left. (A standard RSS image is shown in the upper left corner of this post).

If you happen to be enrolled on an RSS Reader site (Google has one), a window opens up for you to log into the site and the RSS feed link is saved. Each time you visit a new site and want to track new articles, just click on their RSS feed button and the connection will be made.

Here is a short video provided by Lee Lefever of the Common Craft Show providing an overview of RSS basics:

Now that you understand the basics, head off to Google Reader (or research others if you have something against Google), get signed up and start syndicating!

It will definitely help you keep track of all that interesting information (and your competitors!) more easily ….

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