What is RSS?

RSS is a content delivery medium that you can use to notify you of updates from various web sites and publishers. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

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.

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 FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglinesand 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.

Why use it?

1. It's 100% opt-in, meaning you only receive the content you want and you can easily remove any feed when you don't want it anymore.

2. It requires no e-mail address and is not delivered to your e-mail address.

3. You get content exactly at the time it's added to the content feed.

4. Content actually gets through and cannot be blocked by various filters, since this is a completely different system.

5. No viruses, no trojans, no dangerous content.

 

 

 

 

 
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