RSS for you and me

Today (1st May) is the RSS Awareness Day and I would like to let you know about RSS and what it is all about so that you will not be afraid of it anymore like I used to (few years ago).

What is RSS?

RSS is the abbreviation of Really Simple Syndication . It is easily noticed with with this symbol. RSS is a a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed ) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.(1)

Nowadays, internet browsers made it easy for you to detect which website uses this technology. For Firefox, you will see the RSS icon at the right hand side of the bar while in Safari, it will do the same but without the actual RSS icon. Another typical example where RSS technology being used is blog :) Go to any blog that you like and you can detect it easily unless the webmaster does not uses this wonderful technology.

Why bother about RSS?

Since people can subscribe to your RSS feed, you show them you are care about your visitors/users. Besides that, you can also manage how many people interested with what you have to offer. If there aren’t many, you should start to implement new strategy or method to attract new and existing visitors/users.

What elso do you need?

The next thing you need to have is the RSS reader :) which collect the RSS subscribed by you. You are lucky if you have Google account (GMail) because you can straight away use the Google Reader . Besides that, you might also want to try Bloglines or Newsgator .

Conclusion
Last but not least, a video by commoncraft where I first learn about RSS and all my fears about it went away. Sit back and enjoy! Feel free to leave your comment what do you think about RSS – good and bad of it? :)

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Other related articles:

» Discover RSS by JustCreativeDesign

» May 1st RSS Awareness Day by DailyBlogTips

(1) Daily Blog Tips, What is RSS? , http://rssday.org/ (Date of access: 01 May 2008)

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