If you’re a blogger or Internet-savvy user, you might have heard of RSS or better known as Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Site summary does give a clue on its own but coupling that with the word Rich in front, it’s a whole new jargon in the IT world.
So what exactly is Rich Site Summary about? Well, if you ask any technical person or blogger, they might mention more jargon like XML and how it’s a technology used to pull headlines and other content on the Internet.
In layman, RSS is the ability to access or keep track of vast amounts of content easily.
Currently, RSS is used by blog owners and Internet-savvy users who’d like to provide an alternative to users to keep track of latest updates on their website. There are users on the Internet today who are using RSS to spread discount promotions.
When a person says, “you should subscribe to the RSS feed“. He means that you need to look for an orange button with a white dot and 2 white curve lines.
This brings me to my next point of why RSS is not end-user friendly.
As you’ve been reading this entry, if I didn’t tell you in English what RSS is about you’d require a small learning curve about it. This is especially existent to new Internet users like my uncle who was fascinated when I taught him to use Google.
The other thing is the orange icon to represent the availability of the RSS feed on a website. If I showed this icon to an Internet user who’s been using the Internet for 3 months, they wouldn’t realize that the orange icon is actually a button to click and subscribe to an RSS feed. Not to mention that the icon actually looks like a representation of Wi-Fi then something of a syndication to representat a website feed. I hope to come up with a solution for this one day.
When I mentioned RSS, bloggers and Internet-savvy users of 1 year or older might know of it but what about new users or non-bloggers? If I recommended to my client to run a blog and take advantage of RSS and how its beneficial to their business, I’ll get an instant question of, “what is RSS?”.
If you remember the earlier part of this entry, I mentioned that RSS is also known as Really Simple Syndication. Well, syndication of what? By right, we should be using Rich Site Summary instead of Really Simple Syndication to describe what RSS is about and explain further (if necessary) of what RSS really is to customers or friends.
So when a person tells you, “it’s easier to get updates from my website if you subscribed to my ‘feed'” most end-users are actually left in the dark. Reason is that when we use technical terms like ‘feed’ it doesn’t make any sense to end-users. The assumption of believing every Internet user would recall live feed like live news broadcast proves how the use of RSS is actually flawed.
But after this entry, you now know what is RSS so I’m going to share a little about how you can subscribe to ‘feeds’ and use RSS.
There are what we call RSS readers. These readers will translate the XML jargon into readable content for you to read.
Here’s a list of online RSS readers that I know:
Online RSS Readers
Desktop Software RSS Readers
And lastly, How to subscribe to RSS feed?
On a weblog or website, look for the orange icon that has a white dot with 2 white curve lines. To test out your new found knowledge of subscribing to a RSS feed, click on the Subscribe to Websites Made Simple located on the right side.
If you’re like me who uses Mozilla Firefox as my default browser, you can actually subscribe to RSS feeds in the browser itself. Really cool.
So how did you learn about RSS?
[tags]RSS, Blog, RSS reader[/tags]
I often used RSS to catch news from many website. I’m using flock, social web browser. I’t s very useful. I’m catching a news and then blog it using flock. so, i don’t need rss reader anymore. flock is my favorite.
you might get it at flock.com or the portable version: outraged-artists.com :grin:
Yeah, a new alternative to modern browsing the easy way; Flock.
Thanks for the link, Buchin and welcome to my blog. :)
I remembered there were a time when people asked what is ‘e-mail’? RSS and the concept of site syndication has very promising future, give it time and it will be as common as e-mails.
On an another note, most feed reader out there could ‘detect’ feeds on a website by just giving it the website url. Make sure you include the ‘link’ tag inside your HTML come, (with in the ‘head’ tag). You don’t really need the orange icon then.
Jibone, I understand your first paragraph but found myself a little lost in the 2nd one.