RSS: What It Is and How You Can Use It
Monday, July 30, 2007
RSS is a term that’s been floating around for awhile now — the little orange icon is a ubiquitous sight on web pages, blogs, and most up-to-date browsers. Yet despite its highly visible presence on the web, very few average users have an idea of how RSS is useful to them, or what role it might play in the larger picture of interactivity. I’ve written this post to summarize a few key points I haven’t found a clear and concise explanation for just yet:
- What is RSS, exactly, and what’s it used for?
- What am I supposed to be doing with it? (skip here if you want to just get the straight goods)
- Why is it a cool thing?
For the sake of brevity, I’ll ignore the more technical aspects of RSS and focus mostly on how RSS can both give end-users the content that interests them, and more easily connect publishers (websites, blogs, and other online media) with their audiences.
So, what’s RSS all about?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The key word here is syndication:
“… to publish or broadcast material simultaneously in a number of newspapers, television stations, etc.”
On the web, syndication simply refers to the way in which frequently updated content is published to a number of locations. So, the RSS document (commonly called a “feed") acts as a sort of channel, transporting the streamed content to subscribers to that feed. Wikipedia has an excellent history of RSS, if you’re so inclined. If that all sounded a bit jargon-ridden, here is the gist of how it works:
Since I don’t find “newspaper syndication” a particularly satisfying metaphor — as newspapers are bound by things like printing costs, licensing fees, and so forth, and include plenty of content we don’t want or need — I prefer to think of RSS as a pipeline that flows content to a variety of places. The beauty of RSS is that the length and number of pipelines available to us is endless, so you can build thousands of pipelines right to your door. Which brings me to my next point…
What am I supposed to be doing with those little RSS icons?
While RSS is being used on an enormous scale on the internet to deliver content to a variety of places, not very many people have figured out how RSS is supposed to be working for them on an individual level. And the area in which RSS really gets handy is in Feed Readers.
A Feed Reader, or News Aggregator, is a tool that allows you to gather content from all the sources you choose, and stream it to one central location. So, now that you’ve built all these pipelines right to your door, the News Aggregator is the faucet that delivers you that content. In one location, you can manage all of your “subscriptions” (RSS feeds you’ve piped in to your news reader) and get easy deliveries of your chosen content.
What does this look like in practice? Well, generally news aggregators fall into two categories — stand-alone applications (that you would download and run on your computer), or web applications (that are accessible to you in the form of a web page). Your aggregator will automatically update with new content, and indicate which articles are new and which ones you’ve read.
I am on a Mac and use NetNewsWire — it’s simple, intuitive, and has built-in support for things like del.icio.us (something to talk about in another post!). I’ve grouped my subscriptions into greater categories for clarity. NetNewsWire displays a pared down version of the blog posting, with text, images, and links. It will download new postings automatically and let me know when new news items are available to read.
Google Reader is an excellent news reader that’s web-based, meaning I can access it from anywhere with an internet connection.
Other desktop-readers include FeedDemon and FeedReader (both for Windows), and other online-readers include Bloglines and My Yahoo. But expect to see RSS feed support built-in to many programs in the future — the next version of Apple’s Mail program will have RSS subscription support, so you’ll be able to check your blogs and your email all in the same place. If Apple’s trend-setting history is any indication, we can look for other mail programs to follow suit in the next few years.
So now we’ve figured out what RSS does, and how we can get it working for us. What’s the value of such a system, and what are some of the other ways RSS could evolve in the future? In other words…
Why is this a cool thing?
Let’s revisit our pipeline metaphor. Previously, if we wanted that fresh content, we would have to visit a whole variety of places to get it. This inevitably caused lots of problems — often we’d forget where we found a particular article, or get distracted along the way. But with our new setup, we potentially only have to visit a site once and and “subscribe” to its RSS feed, and we no longer have to worry about remembering to check it.
RSS feeds are beneficial for site owners, too. Online traffic can fluctuate wildly depending on the particular article — while one article might get plenty of attention in the blogosphere, another might go by entirely unnoticed. RSS feeders help give your website a more stable readership base, and can help turn an occasional reader into a subscriber.
It’s easy to see how this is relevant for blogs, but RSS can also be used for other types of sites. Generally, RSS is beneficial for anything that has frequently updated content. For instance, a designer with a portfolio site might set up a feed to notify subscribers when they post new work. Corporate companies can easily set up a feed for the press section of their website, notifying subscribers of recent happenings in their workplace. The productivity blog Lifeclever recently wrote about using RSS to do your Craigslist searching for you — a wonderful time-saving trick.
Wrapping it all up
So now that you know what RSS is all about, why not get started with a Feed Reader and start making the web work for you. Already using RSS? Be sure to leave a comment saying how you use it, whether it’s affected your browsing habits, and any tips and tricks you’d like to share. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to the Fleming Design RSS 2.0 feed!