RSS is generally thought to be an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is a very powerful but widely unknown technology on the web today. You will frequently hear about RSS feeds. So what is it and what can it do?

When a user publishes a post to a blog, many blogging systems automatically create or update a special file, the RSS feed file. If other person in the world "subscribe" to that RSS feed file, then the new content published to the blog goes to them automatically. In other words, they don't have to go back to look at the blog every day. The blog comes to them, so to speak.

Many internet users have an RSS feed reader, which is a way to subscribe to RSS feeds. Feed readers can be free online accounts at places like Bloglines.com. Feed readers can also be little inexpensive (maybe even free) applications you install on your computer. But every feed reader is a place to keep all of the feeds to which you subscribe. So, to read all of your feeds from all of the blogs you like, you only have to open your feed reader. You don't have to go to each individual blog one at a time. Each individual blog to which you subscribed sends your feed reader all of the new posts on the blog.

Here is an example: If I have two children in Geek Middle School, and each child has 6 teachers, and each teacher has a blog, I would have twelve blogs to read every day--that's twelve different websites to go visit! But then Geek Middle School has a blog for the principal, one for the nurse, one for the cafeteria, one for the counselor's office, and one for the PTSA. Wait! I now have seventeen blogs to read?! Some of the blogs are only updated once a month or so. And then I like to read the news websites, the websites for the tennis teams, etc. This can quickly get out of control.

So I set up a free Bloglines.com account to use as a feed reader. I create three folders: one for me and one for each of my children. In each folder I subscribe to the feeds that relate to that person. So now everytime one of the teachers posts to his/her blog, the number of unread posts next to that folder increases. Each time I read the feed (post by the teacher) the number decreases. In one convenient organized place, I have access to all of my RSS feeds.

CommonCraft has posted this really great, short, entertaining movie on RSS in Plain English. I encourage you to watch it.

Wikipedia Link: RSS
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Atom
• Podcasting
• Syndication
• RSS Readers
• Yahoo! Pipes, a tool for creating mashups of RSS feeds.
• Rss tracking

Dictionary.com Link: RSS