What the Heck Is RSS?

Back in February 2006 I linked you to a quick little overview of RSS. Let’s slow down and take a longer look now. Even more importantly, let’s consider why you should even care.

Think for a moment about a syndicated columnist whose work appears in your daily paper. The columnist may well live in another state or country, from where they write their daily or weekly offering. When they write a column, you don’t have to do anything special to receive it…if you already subscribe to a newspaper that runs that column, you get it automatically as part of your daily reading experience. And you only see it when you’re good and ready to open the paper and read. It’s just there waiting for you.

RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, accomplishes the same thing via the Internet. When a blogger (or podcaster or vlogger) creates new content, their software automatically notifies the places that want to know (it’s called “pinging”). The places that want to know are feed reader services, search engines, and the like. Those services (which are like the people who run syndication services for the print news media) in turn put the new content into their “readers” (kind of like online newspapers, but organized differently).

When you feel like catching up on your blog subscriptions, you open your RSS reader (just like you’d open your newspaper, in essence). Some news readers reside on your computer as stand-alone software that updates in the background when you’re on the Internet. Many readers are websites; to check your subscriptions, you just go to that website, login, and read.

When you open your news reader, you’ll see that it’s already compiled, while you were away, a list of all new blog posts (vlogs or podcasts work similarly). When you read a newspaper, you probably don’t read every word of every article. You probably peruse headlines and columns, and scan or read those that interest you. Reading blogs in a news reader works similarly…you can scan post titles, open and read those you’re interested in, and click a button to make the rest go away forever. And just as you can cut out a newspaper article for saving, you can click a button on your news reader to save a post for as long as you’d like.

If you don’t use a news reader and instead choose to subscribe to a blog via email, you’ll receive a message anytime that blogger writes a new post (some services send only one a day, putting all posts into one email, and some send a separate email with each post). If you don’t mind more email in your inbox, this is a convenient way to stay on top of a few blogs without going the news reader route.

To find new blogs you can read, scroll down any Mediator Tech page to “Recommended” in the left sidebar. To find more blogs, visit Google’s blog search tool or visit the blogs I list and see who they recommend. To find a good news reader, start with my February 2006 article; shortly after I wrote it Microsoft bought Onfolio and my recommendations changed as a result…other good choices are listed in that article and I now use Google Reader, which works with both Macs and PCs.

Copyright 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.