RSS is one of the most powerful new features of what is generally called “Web 2.0.” It’s also among the most mystifying and misunderstood.
For starters, what does RSS stand for? It’s short for “Really Simple Syndication.” What does “syndication” mean on the Web? The same thing it means in real life: a way to distribute news items, editorial, or other pieces of content to multiple destinations, just like a news service syndicates a column. RSS makes it easy to grab content from your favorite sites.
You’ve no doubt seen those little orange rectangular icons on virtually every Website. Sometimes they are labeled “RSS,” but they can also have other more obscure labels (e.g. XML, Atom). Not to worry, it’s all RSS. And more and more, we are seeing the standard RSS “broadcast” symbol, which looks like the one shown at right (though usually a lot smaller).
RSS is everywhere, but figuring out what it’s for and why you’d want to use it is a conceptual speedbump. What’s missing is some sense of the big picture. Here it is, in the form of a short and entertaining video from a group called Common Craft, entitled “RSS in Plain English“. Go ahead and play it now. It’s not too long, and does a nice job of explaining how to make RSS work for you.
As you can see from the video, the idea behind RSS is very simple, yet revolutionary. We think of the Web as a collection of sites we visit, where we look for information that interests us. Our paradigm is either to search for the information we need, or to frequent a handful of news sites and blogs that tell us what we want to know. We are used to thinking in terms of “going out on the Web” to find news and information.
RSS turns this notion on its head. In effect, it says: “Hey, life is short, and who has the time to keep up with all of this? Instead of going out and looking at a bunch of sites, why don’t you just pick a spot where you can collect information from your favorite sources and easily track it in one place?” It’s the difference between going to three different newstands to pick up the New York Times, The Wall St. Journal and USA Today each day, or having all three papers delivered to your front door. In other words, a subscription. And in fact, that’s what you do with an RSS feed: you subscribe.
Subscribe to what? Well, nowadays virtually any kind of content you want. Almost every site or blog, including this one, offers an RSS feed, and many offer more than one. The New York Times offers several different feeds, as does CNN. They’re a good place to get your feet wet with subscribing to RSS.
So you decide to take the plunge and subscribe to an RSS feed on your favorite news site or blog. Then what happens?
Well, as the video says, first you need to sign up for a reader so you have some place to view all your subscriptions. Here’s some good news: If you are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, you already have an RSS reader built into your browser. Just click the link for the feed and a page comes up showing the contents of the feed, with a big yellow box at the top with some instructions and a link to “Subscribe to this feed.”
Click that link and Internet Explorer adds your chosen feed to your browser’s favorites, in its own special area reserved for RSS feeds. To see this, click “View my feeds” and you will see a display with a list of all your feeds on the left and the content on the right. Click on a different feed and the content changes accordingly.
So what if you don’t have Internet Explorer 7? Instead, you use a Web-based RSS reader. The video shows Google Reader, which is very popular. To find out how to set it up, go to www.google.com/reader (or google “google reader”) and follow the instructions. Yahoo also has its own version, so if you have a MyYahoo personalized page, you can set it up with your favorite feeds. The nice thing about saving RSS feeds onto a Web-based reader is that they are accessible from any computer, and you don’t lose them if you change or upgrade browsers.
Speaking of upgrading browsers, if you are using anything older than Internet Explorer version 6, you are using a browser that doesn’t know anything about RSS, so it shows you a page full of gobbledygook (actually you are looking at the code for the feed). It’s still possible to subscribe to the RSS feed (the video explains how) but do yourself a favor and upgrade to a more current browser version. You’ll be much happier.
OK, so enough with the explanations. The best way to see how RSS can save you time is to go to your favorite sites, look for those orange icons and start subscribing. Then sit back and let your favorite websites come to you!