What is RSS?

What is RSS? First off, some quick stats … Did you know that according to Marketing Sherpa, in February 2006, there were are at least 75 million consumers and business personnel in the USA and UK who use RSS on a regular basis?

But, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17%-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS! That means that roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, “Huh?” if asked “what does RSS mean?”

After reading this, I decided it was time to at least educate my readers and, I’m going to try and answer the question using easy to understand concepts.

What does the acronym RSS stand for?

RSS (sometimes called RSS Feeds, XML, Atom Feeds or Channels) stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, and, the easist way to get some understanding of how RSS works is to consider what happens when you subscribe to either a magazine or newspaper.  If you subscribe to a magazine or newspaper either online or via your local newsagents, you don’t need to physically go and collect your copy each week - they will deliver it to your door.

In the same way when you subscribe to a blog or a website, you’ll receive automatic updates so you don’t have to remember to visit the site or, spend time going back to the site to check whether they have published any new content.  This means you can easily stay informed about what is going on online by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are most interested in.

How do you sign up to a website or blog via RSS?

You may recognize the icons below from sites you’ve visited and probably wondered what on earth they are.  These icons indicate that the site owner is offering you the option of receiving their syndicated content in a format that can be read using what is called an RSS reader also known as an aggregator, that displays RSS or syndicatated feed content from web sites you are subscribed to.

These are just two of the RSS icon that most people recognise:

There are plenty of other icons in use today though, I have noticed that “square” icons seem to have gone out with Web 1.0 if you want to call it that.  In the main, the icons now have rounded corners and come in various shapes and sizes, but in the main the symbol remains the same.

What about RSS Readers?

If you want to be able to read syndicated content from websites or blogs, you’ll need a RSS reader or aggregator which will allow you to read the syndicated content from the sites that you have subscribed to.

Here are a few Feed Reader icons that you may recognise:

I personally use the Google reader since it’s free and easy to use.  There are also paid services such as FeedDemon, but I would suggest as a start that check out the Google reader.

Whichever RSS Feed Reader you use, it will automatically notify you when new content has been published at any of the sites you’ve subscribed to.  To read the content of the RSS feed, all you have to do is click the link – which is usually limited to the headline and a brief description of the newly published content – and you’ll be taken to a new content page associated with the website where you can read the full story.

Sometimes the website publisher will only publish part of the feed content to force you to visit their site, but I’ve personally noticed that my subscriptions increases somewhat when I opt for publishing the full feed.

There is a lot more that can be said about RSS Feeds, readers etc but understanding what RSS is really will help you understand why RSS is so important to you if you are an online publisher.

In the next post, I’m actually going to discuss this more but the meantime, check out this video which will give you the “low down” on RSS in plain English …

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