What Is RSS?

Google Reader Mobile - Mark These Items as Read

Image by Josh Bancroft via Flickr

What is RSS and what's in it for me?

RSS (often known as Really Simple Syndication ) is an easy way for visitors to subscribe to a website and have any new information delivered directly to them without having to subscribe via email.

You can then read the information in an RSS reader or aggregator like the Google reader shown on the right.

The advantages are that the information comes to you instead of you having to visit a website to obtain it and you don't have to give your name and email.

Even better, should you decide you don't want to receive information from that site any more then you can unsubscribe with a single click which is entirely under your control rather than having to rely on an email unsubscribe process.

RSS is supposed to be a standardized format but just the same as usual online there are a number of variations. However, nothing that cannot be easily dealt with.

RSS feeds are usually indicated by an orange XML or RSS buttons like the one at the start of this sentence which allow you to locate feeds quickly. But they also come in various shapes and sizes – like the newspaper reading guy on this site.

The advantage of using an RSS reader is that you can assemble all the feeds that you want to keep up with in one place so you can see it all together. Rather like having your own personal newspaper.

It's a very convenient way of keeping up to speed with what is going on. If you would like to keep up with my progress then why not subscribe right now.

I found this video on YouTube to help you get to grips with RSS.

How do I subscribe to a feed?

Just log in to MyMSN, MyYahoo!, Google Reader or Bloglines and click the relevant button:

These four services are the only ones you really need to care about. The benefit of using them is two-fold:

A web-based service means your favorite feeds will remain available when you change computers
Search engines (will) provide tools to organize feeds by topic and relevance rather than by site and date

I use the Google Reader myself for two reasons. Firstly, it has a list function so you can just scan the headlines to sort out what is interesting to you instead of having to read the first few lines of every entry. Secondly, if you use it with Google Mail which, again, I highly recommend, then they are both available on a single screen within your account.

The drawback is of course your loss of privacy. If you dislike the idea that Google knows more about you than yourself, then use something else. But as I'm not doing anything shady or illegal I'm happy to use the powerful tools that Google provides.