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What is RSS anyway?
6 November 2006Question of the day:
What is RSS anyway?
Ok, so I have read different people’s attempts to explain RSS and to be honest with you even though I knew it stood for “really simple syndication” the jargon that is thrown around with the term got me nowhere. I found that there was nothing “simple” about it.
I really haven’t seen a good explanation of it and I’ve never used it and to be honest, I didn’t really want to.
So, this weekend when a mediator in my marketing workshop asked what RSS was…. I am embarrassed to say, I didn’t have a good answer.
So, with that admission out there on the table, I set out to figure out what the heck this whole RSS thing is all about.
But first, before bothering with this endeavor I ask myself: “Why do I care?” Then, for you my beloved mmtips readers I ask, “Why should anyone care?”
To date, I have been perfectly happy with the email readers like the one on this site — where you enter your email and then you get notified once a few posts have been updated to a blog.
Then, I was reading Geoff Sharp’s recent article about blogging on mediate.com and he laid out the relevance clear as the blue sky — you use an RSS feeder to be able to collect blog entries from blogs you want to read. it is a much more efficient way to get the information and if you want to follow certain blogs, it’s an easy way to do so.
As soon as someone writes a blog and publishes it, if you have signed up for that particular blog’s RSS entries and you have something to “catch” the feed (like Bloglines), then the posts will be sent to your desktop or a file on your computer where you can read the recent blog entries of your choice at your convenience.
Bottom line: it’s a direct way to get blog entries without having to bookmark, sign up for email notices, etc. and then physically go to each blog’s site to read the latest posts.
For a good explanation of all the terms and more detail as to how it works check out the Wisconsin Lawyer’s explanation since my version is the kindergarten level.
I hope this is helpful.
(and yes, my RSS feed is not working on this site, so we will have to look into fixing that) (this “we” definitely does not mean me as I have gone as far down the technology path as I care to go 
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NEVER GIVE UP!
Your partner in peace,
Kristina Haymes