What is an RSS feed?
I see this option on many blogs and here on Linked In to "subscribe to RSS feed" and being somewhat non-technical I have no idea what it means.
Cans someone advise what it is and if it is beneficial?
Thanks in advance!
Susan
Good Answers (2)
Michael C
Chief Scientist at RedJack
Best Answers in: Education and Schools (1), Public Relations (1), Career Management (1), Blogging (1), Databases (1), Information Storage (1)
RSS is short for 'really simple syndication', and as the name implies, it's intended to be a simple way for you to read blog posts at your own leisure. When you subscribe to an rss feed, the tool that reads the feed (which can be a web browser, an email application, or a specialized application of its own) will fetch the articles from the blog for you, and keep them as seperate articles. Essentially, rss tells a computer what a blog post is, and then the computer can juggle blog posts for you.
The practical result of this is that, instead of having to go to a blog's website, you can have your rss reader automatically collect them and then provide them to you in an integrated view. If you read a *lot* of blogs (where a lot is a function of your patience, my definition of a *lot*, for example, is 3), then RSS provides a lot of advantages - it can automated fetching the posts, it can provide them to you in a constant format, and it can provide them to you in one location.
Adeel A
Computer Software Professional
Best Answers in: Web Development (2), Government Services (1), Information Storage (1), Software Development (1)
From Answer.com
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(Really Simple Syndication) A syndication format that was developed by Netscape in 1999 and became very popular for aggregating updates to blogs and the news sites. RSS has also stood for "Rich Site Summary" and "RDF Site Summary." See syndication format for details on the RSS syndication process. See blog and podcast.
RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0
There are two lineages of RSS. RSS 1.0 conforms to the W3C's RDF specification and was released from the RSS-DEV Working Group in 2000 (see RDF). RSS 2.0, which evolved from Netscape's Versions 0.90 and 0.91, was released by Harvard Law School in 2003.
In 1999, Radio Userland's Dave Winer took over RSS 0.91, later upgrading it to Versions 0.92 and 0.94 and turning it over to Harvard in 2003 as RSS 2.0. Most news viewers support both formats.
For more information, check out the links below.