I had someone today ask me what RSS was, especially since we have all seen RSS all over the ‘net in the last couple years. For anyone that doesn’t know, RSS is an acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it represents a standard format for sharing, or syndicating data. You create an XML file in this standard RSS format, that has the data in it you want to syndicate, then the client side can grab that file and process the data to display it on a web page or in a RSS reader or aggregator program.
Rather than re-invent the wheel so to speak, I’ll send you to Wikipedia for more information, they have a great writeup on RSS, and other similar formats past, present and future. In short, RSS is a great way to very easily syndicate or share data elements from one source to many destinations.
For me RSS has become the way I keep up with news. I rarely visit websites such as google news, nytimes, washingtonpost, etc, anymore… i just subscribe and scan headlines. Too much info to go to every single website. Scanning headlines is more efficient. My RSS reader of choice at the moment is Google Reader, but I have also started using NetNewsWire on my MacBook. Reference: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/netnewswire.html
I do some website visiting, but also I love my RSS feeds. I have never used Google reader before, but I checked it out today and it’s quite nice. I have been using SharpReader and the cool thing is that I can export my whole list of feeds to an OPMN file, which I could then import right into Google reader, so I didn’t have to re-enter all that stuff. That my friend is how open standards are supposed to work! Thanks for the info Mack.
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