What is RSS ?

RSS is a technology used to quickly distribute on-demand information to subscribers of an RSS Feed. This information can be a simple news article or even an Mp3 file (called a Podcast).

An RSS feed allows an internet user to easily recieve updates or new content from a website using a simple program called a Feed Aggregator. Feed aggregators work similar to (and are usually included in) modern email clients. A feed is usually shown as a small orange icon, such as one of the following:

What Can It Do?

RSS is powerful in that it allows users to easily subscribe to content and then read the content on-demand. For example, a patron of CNN.com can subscribe to the CNN RSS news feed and recieve an email-like message in their aggregator every time CNN then releases a news update. This message would contain a link to the article and a summary of its contents.

The most popular use for RSS today is for blogging. A blog is a personal journal of thoughts or ideas that someone shares with the world. A subscriber to a blog would recieve an update every time a new post is added to that blog.

Another use for RSS is Podcasting, subscription-based distribution of audio or video files.

Other types of RSS feeds include the following:

• Vlog: A video-blog. Similar to a podcast, only with video.
• Photocasts/Picturecasts: RSS feeds containing sets of pictures. For example, a person could set up a photocast for their camera phone, and every picture they would take would be added to their photocast.
• Screencast: A photocast containing chronological snapshots of a computer screen. For example, a person could set up a screencast to automatically distribute a picture of what they were doing after a set number of minutes.
• Media RSS: An effort by Yahoo to allow for multiple media types in the same feed. For example, photos and audio. These feeds can also be sets of search results, which update as new results appear. Yahoo! Search already implements this.

Feed Aggregators

In order to read an RSS feed, you will need a aggregator. Feed aggregators can range from simple command-line applications to large-scale web applications.

Aggregator applications are catalogued on the List of news aggregators page.